[time-nuts] HP 5060A option 004

[Marc Bury]

Chuck,

Thanks for your explanations.
I gathered from HP Journals from september 1973 that option 004 was indeed an upgrade for the 5060A and 5061A, using a dual Cesium ions beam in a slightly longer tube 
So size does matter sometimes !
I also read abour the HP 10638A external degauss accessory (two level AC power supply form what I understand), but not about the AC/DC heater issue.
These tubes also had a shorter life: about half the original one, which would account nicely for the double ion beam, so mine may well be pumped out; its warranty expired in 1985.

I put pictures of it on the web: http://tichu.free.fr/HP_5060A/
As con can see, some controls on the front were removed (scavenged ?), but the oven  labels have been painted over: was it part of the option 004 tube upgrade ?

About the manuals: would you consider parting from them ? or lending them to a good soul that could scan them and build a PDF for the HP archives or agilent website ?


>  Re: HP 5060A option 004 (Chuck Norton)
>
> Hi Marc, sorry I forgot to mention about the option 004. When the 5060 was being built, there were no high
> performance tubes as such. Even when the 5061A was originally released, there wasn't one available for it either.
>  The option 004 tube came along later. Because the tube connections were essentially the same, you could install an
> option 004 high performance tube in the 5060A and get better performance out of your old unit. This was done on a
> number of them and you had to do some modifications to get them to work correctly...ie the degauss coil connections.
> It wasn't a simple "drop in" the first time. You could of course install the tube and not the degauss but you would be
> losing some of your performance enhancements if you did. At quite a cost increase too.
>    One thing you would want to be cautious of if you find the tube is indeed dead. The early tubes used an AC heater
> circuit that produced an audible whine. The later tubes were designed for a DC heater circuit and required a completely > different heater module. I don't believe one was ever made for the 5060A. HP would not even warranty a DC tube that > got installed into a unit with an AC heater circuit. This was true whether it was a high performance tube or not. I don't
> know if it was a serious problem or if HP was just covering their bases in case the unit wouldn't quite meet all of it's
> specs with the DC tube.
>    I have a number of the older manuals but do not have the means to do a pdf scan on them to make them available to
> the rest of the group. I have the 5060A, 5061A, 5061B, 5062C, and the 5065A rubidium. Unfortunately, I haven't had > the time to make any copies of them, much less scan them since it takes about 2 hours each. Unfortunately, the machines > do not like the pages that have been hole punched so you have to feed them in by hand. There were many versions of
> some of these manuals so you want to find one that is as close to your serial numbers prefix, (without being below the
> number) as you can.
>
> Chuck Norton
> Frequency Standards & Services


	

	
		
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