[time-nuts] GPSDO & Crystal Aging

bownes bownes at gmail.com
Fri Apr 11 18:52:24 UTC 2014


Interesting idea. It might be an interesting experiment to couple a large number of inexpensive xtals to see how it impacts effects such as sudden changes in a single xtal. 

With sufficient monitoring of each one, you could even tune the coupling to amplify/attenuate the results of the 'good' and 'bad' ones over some interval. 

Of course, what effect this has on things like phase noise, drift, and so on is a whole different matter. 

Bob

> On Apr 11, 2014, at 14:14, "Richard (Rick) Karlquist" <richard at karlquist.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 4/11/2014 11:04 AM, Hal Murray wrote:
>> 
>> How many would you need?  Is 3 enough?
>> 
>> How well could you do with several low(er) cost oscillators relative to one
>> good but expensive one?  It might be an interesting experiment in a nutty
>> sort of way.
> 
> My guess would be 3 would be a minimum, so you
> could have a majority vote.  Len Cutler's group
> actually built an experimental ensemble of 9 or
> 10, but it didn't seem to come to fruition.
> For this to make any sense, you would need to be
> able to cherry pick 9 or 10 really good oscillators.
> However, there was no way to get the production
> line to sign on to this.
> 
> David Allan had
> this interesting concept to the effect that if
> you had a sufficient number of wristwatches
> (maybe 1000) and you averaged them together
> you could somehow get a quality clock, or at
> least 31.6 times better.  Kind of like the
> notion of 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters...
> 
> Rick
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