[time-nuts] HP 106B on Ebay

[ed breya]

Speaking of antique OCXO references, I picked up two different ones for 
cheap over the last couple of years. One is a GenRad 1115A, and the 
other is a Vectron FS-323.

Unbeknownst to me, the GenRad was totally shot. I brought it home from a 
flea market carefully, but upon flipping it around to check things out, 
I heard that sound that makes me cringe - broken glass inside, that same 
sound and feeling as a busted CRT - it had been dropped in its past. 
This unit appeared to be a single-oven, enclosed in a Dewar flask. I 
opened it up and cleared out some of the debris, and set it aside. 
Recently, I took another look at it, and cleaned out the rest of the 
glass shards and polyurethane foam. I happened to have a similar (same 
ID but shorter by about two inches) Dewar from an old Thermos bottle, 
and tried remounting the guts in that, plus layers of foam outside for 
cushioning and insulation. It didn't put out any 5 MHz. I figured it was 
a goner anyway, so took it all apart, and found that two small pot core 
chokes used in the oscillator circuit had deteriorated so much from the 
heat that the bobbins and leads fell apart - probably from the same 
event that popped the flask. There's pretty much zero info out there on 
this, so I didn't bother trying to rescue it beyond this point - it's 
parts now.

The Vectron fared a lot better - it seems to work as-is, which is good 
because there's no info on it either, as far as I can tell. It seems to 
be a double-oven type, with one of their regular single-oven units 
packed inside a large oven/insulator box. I managed to coarse tweak it 
against an Rb unit, and it was looking good last time I checked.

Does anyone have or know of info on this unit?

Ed