[time-nuts] Re: HP 5061A - bad cesium beam tube?

[Matt Huszagh]

paul swed <paulswedb at gmail.com> writes:

> The shipping is going to be nasty but then you have dealt with that already.
> Frankenstein's beam is 0 and it was a bad tube given to me. The original
> was a option 004 and it was totally dead.
> It gets tricky if you have a RB and the CS. Who is right? If you have a
> gpsdo thats very helpful in understanding which one may be drifting.
> Frankenstein's beam has always been 0. But the 2nd harmonic is 32. I
> actually inserted an amplifier in the beam measuring circuit and could read
> the beam current or leakage. Who knows it was very small and did seem to
> peak. But it does lock and doesn't seem to drift with respect to the other
> Cs. I use a GPSDO to set the 5 MHz. Eliminates the whole double peak
> possible issue.
> Depending on how much you paid. It could be a keeper. Frankenstein was $125
> at a flea market. But the lessons I learned from it have been far more
> valuable/fun.

Yeah I'd very much like to keep it. I've already learned a lot and
enjoyed trying to get this to lock. But, the price I paid is too much
for something that's EOL. If the price comes way down (which I think it
should) then I'll hold onto it and since it works to an extent, I should
be able to get some use out of it.

I have a trimble thunderbolt GPSDO. Unfortunately, I'm living in an
apartment for at least the next couple months and can't get a good GPS
signal here, which is why I used the rubidium.

Matt