[time-nuts] How do I know my GPS stabilized oscillatoris working?

SAIDJACK at aol.com SAIDJACK at aol.com
Sat Aug 12 21:03:34 EDT 2006


Hi Ulrich,
 
I've been using your plotter tool for a while now, and Congrats! It's quite  
good, I was very impressed. It's a wonderfull tool.
 
Here are some suggestions that came out of every-day real life experience,  
and may help to make it even better:
 
   * It would be good to have the tool normalize the vertical  axix for every 
column when showing more than one column superimposed. It does  this if you 
only view a single column, but if you show two or more with  different scales 
(say frequency accuracy and temperature versus time)  the tool doesen't create 
multiple scales to fit the two data columns inside the  same window.
 
   * There are so many options to choose from that sometimes it  is a bit 
hard to find what one is looking for. For example, if I want  to change the 
vertical scale from scientific notation to scalar notation to see  more than two 
digits of resolution, I have to go quite deep into the Axis menu.  It would be 
great if the axis could be clicked, and the scale changed similar to  how Excel 
does it.
 
   * Once zoomed-in, it would be nice to have a zoom-out feature.  I figured 
out how to do it with the right mouse button and selecting from right  to left 
on the window, but maybe there is a way to just click somewhere to zoom  out 
again to see all data?
 
   * On the Allan deviation table shown next to the plot, I think  the tool 
goes up only to show up to 4098 (?) s worth of data, even if data worth  100000 
seconds has been captured and is shown on the plot.  A couple more  entries 
in the table would be nice: maybe at time intervalls where a major  vertical 
decimal is broken (say for example 15500s if at that point the measure  is 
exactly 1.0E-014, then 102300s if it reaches 1.0E-015 at that point  etc)
 
   * My HP 5334B counter, when set to A-B time mode will  sometimes generate 
negative time measurements (for example -6ns, -13ns  etc), but then for some 
reason measure across one second so it jumps to  +999999993ns etc. Don't know 
why the 5334B firmware does this. The effect  is that the Plotter tool gets 
jammed by the large difference in the two  scales. I cannot filter the larger 
values out with the "delete outlier" button.  Could this be added so the tool can 
recognize this issue and handle it  correctly?
 
   * While drift can be removed, could you also add a feature  that shows the 
least-mean-square fit (average line or something similar) through  a 
drifting, noisy plot?
 
  * Could you please add a help button to explain the many features  
(buttons) of the tool?
 
  * Is there a way to select colors for columns? One of  the traces I have is 
always white on the plot, and it's very hard to see on  the screen, as well 
as almost impossible to printout onto paper.
 
   * An "oscilloscope" type marker tool would be great, where you  drag a 
vertical line right and left with the mouse across the plot, and you have  a 
readout of the vertical value of the selected column data at that exact  point.
 
   * It seems that the Allan Deviation etc. is always calculated  over the 
entire data set (is that true?), even if you zoom into a small portion  of the 
dataset. It would be great to only do the stability math on the data  that's 
actually visible on the screen (or even better: choose from the two  options: 
math over full dataset, or selected subset).
 
Hope not to have rambled too much; again this is a great tool!
 
Thanks for sharing it,
bye,
Said
 
 


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