[time-nuts] Question for the cesium nuts.

[Tim Shoppa]

"Jack Hudler" <jack at hudler.org> wrote:
> Which begs the question of; who's cesium standard will we buy in surplus
> market?
>
> From my POV (which could be myopic), a few CBT manufacturers are controlling
> what remains of this market (no I'm not a conspiracy nut, it's just
> business), so it seems to me that the surplus market is going to get very
> thin in the near future. 
> Supply and demand dictates that surplus market prices will skyrocket out of
> the vast majority of amateur reaches in the coming years.
>
> So what's the next cesium standard to start showing up on eBay in numbers
> with life left?

The last big boom in CBT and other timing equipment was the telecom
boom of the late 90's, and when it went pop (actually even before) a lot
of almost new stuff hit the surplus stream big-time.

The telecom boom-bust cycle there will not be repeated in quite
the same way and I cannot imagine doing it to the same scale, where
startup telcos and equipment manufacturers could get funding to
get hundreds of millions of dollars equipment made without any
paying customers :-).

The next big thing may not be cesium standards, might be something else,
but it'll probably be tied to some other boom-bust cycle in some
tech/business sector.

Each boom-bust cycle will not be exacltly like the one before, the
cold-war military/avionics stuff I grew up with is probably never
going to happen again either. Nor are the R-390A's piled to the
sky, nor are the command sets by the thousands, but in reality none
of that stuff is particularly hard to come by. I just picked up a
couple of command sets that had been sitting in a guy's garage
for 40 years and are exactly like they were when he got them!

Tim.