[time-nuts] Picked up the Austral 2200A tonight

[Jason Ball]

Just picked it up, it has an internal rubidium which piqued my interest as
worst case I could cannibalize the unit.  It's also been sitting on a shelf
for > 10 years so the oscillator should hopefully have some life left in it.

What does surprise me is the firmware is dated 25th August 1998, I was of
the opinion these units weren't Y2K compliant and would have assumed an
update in 1998 would have been tested...   gps rollover not withstanding.

Is there anyway to get the 10MHz output running off the rubidium without a
satellite lock ?   I can't seem to trigger it just yet.

My plan is to use a DDS to generate a 1.Ghz LO and to feed this into a
suitable mixer to down convert to the 75.42Mhz input signal for the gps
reference as a start to see if I can get the thing working, allowing for
the 1024 week offset of course.  Just waiting on parts at the moment.

Cheers
J.


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Teach your kids Science, or somebody else will :/

jason at ball.net
vk2vjb at google.com <vk2flnx at google.com>
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