[time-nuts] Western Electric O-451A/U double-oven XO

[Eric Scace]

> On 2016 Apr 26, at 16:25 , paul swed <paulswedb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Tom,
> Thanks for sharing the photos.
> 
> Comments
> It looks like most of the items will clean up very well with a bit of TLC.

   Agree. That won’t be hard. Mostly sawdust from cellar storage at my parents’ home.

> Tom it may be you actually who wrote about the clock and getting it working.
> Either way I am pretty sure Eric can find helpful details before he applies
> power.

   The mystery unit is the double-oven XO in the bottom unit. We (my father and I) have had that operational and did a year’s worth of phase comparisons with WWVB back around 1980. Unfortunately I haven’t found the chart recorder strips from those runs. But I don’t expect any problems to get the equipment operational again with a cleaning and re-capping.

> The same goes for most of the rest of the gear. The old caps may have a
> nasty surprise waiting.

> Eric the WWVB receiver will no longer work with the new WWVB modulation
> format. I assume it was a typical TRF radio of the 1960-70s vintage.

   Ha! This was a home-brew from scratch by my father in 1979. (He got the bug when I brought home the DOCXO and HP-113BR. Working at NBS/NIST also helped.) But yes, it doesn’t pay any attention to the modern modulation format. The receiver/comparator’s goal was to establish a “clean” 60 kHz signal that was phase-locked to WWVB with some moderate time constant short enough to easily detect the intentional phase shift of WWVB’s signal at the time — and then perform the comparator task against local sources and drive a chart recorder with the results. If folks are interested, I’ll post his “as built” photos and circuit diagram when I unpack the documentation.

   Sadly, since the start of this year my father has been existing in a dementia wing at a graduated living facility. Restoring this equipment to service in my home is an emotional homage to the man who taught me so much about practical electronics. Thanks, Dad — I miss you.


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