[time-nuts] Fwd: Re: Re: ammonia, cesium, masers, etc.

[ed breya]

I was just looking at a HP8566, and found that it can reach the right
range, right on the hairy edge of its capability. It's specified range
is to 22 GHz, but you can tell it to go up to 24 GHz stop frequency -
beyond that it will ignore numeric entries, or adjust the other
parameters to limit it there. So, you can say, set the center to the
23.870 GHz or so, and span up to 200 MHz (slightly more actually), for wide searching for absorption frequencies. This puts the top frequency at 23.97 GHz, without being rejected or
altered. So, it's in uncharted and unspecified territory, but it does
cover the desired range, without resorting to external mixers. This
gives a fairly wide-band view with noise floor around -60 dBm.

It looks like you can narrow things down enough to reach -70-80 dBm, at reasonable rep rates.

Ed