[time-nuts] The ultraAtomic clock for home

[Tom Van Baak]

> Very good catch it is *not* the cme8000 chip. Thats a classic am receiver.
> It is the everset chip. Sorry for mis-leading.

Hi Paul,

I can confirm (from talking with the guys backing it) that, yes, it's the EverSet ES100, in die form (CoB). I believe you and I have both used the early Xtendwave dev kits with the ES100 as SMT part. It's nice to see the chip still lives and finally made it to a product!


I uploaded more ultrAtomic info and tear-down photos:

http://leapsecond.com/pages/ultratomic/

I encourage those of you who just bought these clocks to do some experiments. The obvious ones are:

1) See how long it takes to acquire the correct time, at all sorts of different and difficult environments, compared to the traditional WWVB clocks. Check for off-by-one second, or minute, or hour errors.

2) See how accurate they really are. For clocks like this I use a variety of piezo sensors (feel the tick), acoustic sensors (hear the tick), optical sensors (see the tick), and mostly electrical sensors. Some of these are passive (non-destructive) timings and good enough. Others require some level of disassembly but are more precise. For a stepper motor clock it's easy to tap onto the coil connections and get a sharp pulse every second or two. Then use a time interval counter, or picPET, or TICC, or PC-based PPS-capture to collect readings. Note the signal level is usually low power and below typical TTL levels, and they do NOT drive 50R!


If all goes well, we can soon talk about a time-nuts special where we get someone to make a timing board or disciplined timing board based on the ES100 chip. The bad news is that at the same price it would be like a million times worse than GPS. The good news is that lots of applications need only ms level timing; there are places where WWVB is receivable and GNSS is not; and then there's the redundancy and low-power factor.

/tvb

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "paul swed" <paulswedb at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement" <time-nuts at febo.com>
Sent: Friday, April 07, 2017 5:08 AM
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] The ultraAtomic clock for home


Tom
Very good catch it is *not* the cme8000 chip. Thats a classic am receiver.
It is the everset chip. Sorry for mis-leading.
Regards
Paul
WB8TSL