[time-nuts] The 5MHz Sweet Spot

Attila Kinali attila at kinali.ch
Sun Nov 3 19:05:24 UTC 2013


On Sun, 3 Nov 2013 09:33:57 -0800
Said Jackson <saidjack at aol.com> wrote:

> Crystal jumps are the biggest menace facing users of crystals/oscillators
> today and so far I have never been given a reasonable explanation from any
> of the vendors out there what causes it and how to avoid it or how they plan
> to address it.

Could these be related to frequency dips?
Or radiation dependent jumps of unswept crystals?


> I think this is the area of Quartz processing that has the least amount of
> research invested into it, and as anyone that has seen their Z38xx unit
> jump up and down in phase can attest to its a menace and can ruin one's day.

Well one of our problems with quartz oscillators these days is,
that most of the knowhow is at the manufacturers behind locked doors.
It's quite hard to come by some good knowlege how to build crystall
oscillators these days. The good books have been written 20-30 years
ago and have been out of print for nearly as long.
I talked with some of the people who are kind of famous in the field
at the EFTF in Prague this summer, and half of them agreed, the other
half was more like "that's a solved problem" and "look for more intersting
problems to solve than crystal oscillators".

Doing research in this kind of enviornment is difficult at best.
Getting results out of one manufacturer is even harder.


> I wish there were something besides yield testing that can be done to avoid
> manufacturing and shipping bad crystals to integrators. BVA seems to be one
> of those solutions, but how many BVA's have we seen in products that cost
> $400 retail??

Well, considering that a BVA costs at least 10 times as much...


			Attila Kinali

-- 
1.) Write everything down.
2.) Reduce to the essential.
3.) Stop and question.
		-- The Habits of Highly Boring People, Chris Sauve



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