[time-nuts] Did a member of time-nuts buy this?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sun, Dec 7, 2014 at 7:03 PM, Bob Camp <kb8tq at n1k.org> wrote:
> Of the $20K to $30K that a new tube costs, I doubt the material and basic assembly adds up to over $5K. The rest of the cost is the final assembly / test / yield / re-test / tooling / labor. That’s doing them in as high a volume as anybody does them. You will need either a couple of H-Masers or a set of Cs’s running and in good condition simply to make sure you got them put together right ….

I'm sure that assembly/test/yield/re-test/tooling/labor are all
killers, but why the comment on h-masers?

CS beam standards are largely self-calibrating, thats why they can be
primary references.  For checking against systemic error you might
want a CS ensemble, but everyone has access to one of those for long
term measurement via GPS.