[time-nuts] 5370 firmware hacking status report

[Frank Stellmach]

Hi,

the 5370 is capable of measuring up to 10s long time events or 
frequency/period with 10s gate time. (I.e. 2^39 * 19.53ps)

Pressing 'external holdoff' activates external gating on 'EXT' input.

Then you may apply a 10s long positive pulse from an external generator, 
with a few ms long pause, to the external input, getting 12 digits 
resolution.

To have this longer gate time in firmware would be nice.

Interesting would be to have even longer than 40 Bit arithmetic length 
by counting the overflow of the counter chain, and also, to  get access 
to the full content of the arithmetic registers to calculate with higher 
precision externally.

Or perhaps it is possible to realize a 'time stamp counter' on the 5370s 
hardware, to get zero dead time for T.I. measurements on 1pps comparisons.


Frank