[time-nuts] Three-cornered hat on timelab?

[John Miles]

Longer runs would be better to the extent that they give you smaller error bars in your tau range of interest, certainly.  But any effects that influence one of your runs but not the others will render the 3-cornered hat solution questionable, if not outright invalid.  Only through many repeated runs can you learn to tell the bogus data from the good stuff.  So I'd make shorter runs at first, until you're sure you know what you're looking at.

 

It doesn't matter which source is applied to the start versus stop channel, as long as the assignments are consistent with the source labels you apply.  I would use frequency-count mode to simplify things, at least at first.  This is already a very challenging measurement for all the reasons mentioned. 

 

-- john, KE5FX

Miles Design LLC

 

 

From: Bob Stewart [mailto:bob at evoria.net] 
Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2017 8:41 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement; John Miles
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Three-cornered hat on timelab?

 

Hi John,

 

Thanks!  With lesser equipment, such as the 5370A, would longer runs be better?  I used a set of 1 hr runs and the result wasn't quite what I had expected.  However, it may be that I had mislabeled the files, and thus got the sources confused.  Of course, it may be that the ionospheric effect was grossly different between the three tests.  So, with a 5370, Source A would be the START input and Source B would be the STOP input, right?  For my testing, the sources are all 10MHz signals, and I'm driving the EXT input with 1PPS from a GPSDO.



 

Bob