[time-nuts] What is the best counter for a Time Nuts?

[Mike Monett]

  > Mike

  > You've obviously never tried this, in practice its noise is  a lot
  > higher than you think, perhaps 2 orders of magnitude worse  than a
  > double balanced mixer.

  > You need to breadboard this and do some tests.

  > Bruce

  Bruce,

  Thank you for the reply. Please let me introduce myself.

  I know this circuit very well. I've been using it since  1970, where
  it formed  the  basis  of development work  that  led  to  my second
  patent, US 4533881. Among other things, this patent was the first to
  recognize the  problem  of   deadband   in  the  PLL phase/frequency
  detector, and  shows how to fix it. People still get  it  wrong even
  today.

  That patent led to an amazing discovery, documented in the paper:

  "Effect of  Bitshift   Distribution   on   Error   Rate  in Magnetic
  Recording", Eric R. Katz and Thomas G. Campbell, IEEE Transaction on
  Magnetics, Vol. MAG-15, No. 3, May 1979, pp 1050-1053.

  This technique  saved  the  hard  disk  drive  industry  hundreds of
  millions, if not billions of dollars. It did this by  separating the
  contributions of  the head, media, preamplifier, servo  system, disk
  defects, external  EMI,  and anything else that  affected  the error
  rate. It gave manufacturing a very quick test to tell if a drive was
  meeting the error rate spec, and tells what to do if it failed.

  It also  gave  head  and media manufacturers a  way  to  measure the
  performance of  their  products, and a way to  meet  the competition
  that was  using the same technique. It told R&D  engineers  how well
  their design  was  working, and what to do to improve it.  It  had a
  tremendous effect  on  every disk drive company on  the  planet, and
  there were over 220 at the peak.

  I made a great deal of money developing test systems that  used this
  technique for  manufacturers all over the world. I owned a  house in
  Saratoga Hills in Silicon Valley. I had two Mercedes and three Lexus
  for my  managers,  and gave a bunch of Toyota station  wagons  to my
  staff so they wouldn't have problems getting to work. I  helped most
  of my staff buy houses. I bought this plane brand new,  Piper Malibu
  N4360V.

  http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=5874208&nseq=0

  This is  a twin turbocharged with constant speed  prop, pressurized,
  retractable, six-place  high  performance  aircraft  with  a service
  ceiling of  25,000 ft. That is above most of the weather, and  I put
  over 750  hours  on it flying to customers all over the  US.  It was
  truly the nicest plane I have ever had the pleasure to fly,  but you
  have to  watch  it on takeoff when the turbos spool  up.  The torque
  will take you into the weeds if you are not ready for it. It is very
  nice to see it is still in the air:)

  All of this resulted from work using the circuit I  described above,
  so I  know it pretty well. It works a lot better than  you  think it
  does.

  It also  forms the basis of two of my latest inventions,  which will
  be disclosed  as soon as I have time to get my new web  site  up and
  running.

  The old  site was finally taken down by Microsoft, so  I  can't give
  you a  working  url. But at this moment,  searching  for  the phrase
  "binary sampler"  in quotes gives me the first four hits  in google,
  so you  can see it was up until recently. Unfortunately  the WayBack
  machine doesn't link to images, so I can't send you there to see how
  it works.  But  I  should  have  the  above  circuit  running around
  Christmas, along with some other new stuff.

  I'll be happy to discuss these issues when there is hardware to make
  measurements on.

  Best Regards,

  Mike Monett