[time-nuts] Thinking outside the box a super reference

[Bob Camp]

Hi

Not many people have had exposure to Rb’s or Cs standards actually being 
built. That leaves a major gap in who you can call when you run into a problem. 

Until you have tried to build one it’s not at all clear just how much “missing information” there
is in all those papers. It’s very much like the semiconductor business. Lots of 
information is published. There are indeed lots of gaps. At some point you must
build tooling and get it all working. 

Again, we are talking about a device that is at least as good as a 5065 and not
something that just barely works. If you *could* build something better than a 5065
for a thousand or two dollars, it would be on the market today. 

Bob

> On Nov 3, 2016, at 6:34 PM, Attila Kinali <attila at kinali.ch> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 3 Nov 2016 16:54:24 -0400
> Bob Camp <kb8tq at n1k.org> wrote:
> 
>> If you look at a modern CPU as “just a handful of sand and some stuff”, it seems
>> pretty easy to build one in the kitchen after an hour or two of setup. When you dig
>> into the nasty details the line costs rapidly spiral off into the stratosphere. Atomic 
>> standards are not quite as complex, but there still is more than just a little custom 
>> equipment involved. $1M sounds a bit on the low side of what it might take. 
> 
> 
> Not necessarily. There is a large corpus of knowledge available on
> how to build vapor cells standards and what is a good idea and what
> isn't. Most of it is documented in papers of the PTTI, EFTF and IFCS.
> The former two are freely available (for PTTI until 2010, but that
> should be good enough). Getting access to those papers behind a
> paywall, you only need to know someone with access to a university.
> (not for PTTI post 2010 though, ION has quite anal access rules)
> 
> Additionally, the people in the time and frequeny community are very
> open to discussion and exchange of knowledge. You can almost always
> just walk up to someone and ask questions with a high chance of getting
> not only answers but help in how to proceede. 
> 
> Tapping into this knowhow would avoid the need to try out the whole
> solution space and concentrate on the few parts that are unkown or
> not well enough understood and optimize those. And by doing so safe
> a lot of money.
> 
> 			Attila Kinali
> 
> -- 
> Malek's Law:
>        Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way.
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