[time-nuts] Determining Time-Nut infection severity.

[David Martindale]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 1:44 PM, Richard H McCorkle
<mccorkle at ptialaska.net> wrote:
> Time-Nuts,
>
> New members to the Time-Nuts list may wonder if the Time-Nut disease
> has infected them just by joining the list. A clear indication that
> someone has been infected with the Time-Nut disease is they own a
> reference that provides accurate time to better than 1us and
> frequency to better than 1e-9.

Is there a "cadet" grade?  I have a GPS receiver with 1PPS output, but
it only claims microsecond accuracy.  I have an OCXO salvaged from an
old Transit satellite navigator, but it claims no better than a few
parts in 1e-8.  And I've got a Thunderbolt, but haven't found time to
apply power to it.  So I guess I'm not up to the standards of a true
time-nut.

On the other hand, this does suggest a plausible metric for nuttiness:
the negative of the base-10 log of the frequency uncertainty of the
best reference you own.  So the scale for fully qualified nuts starts
at 9 and goes upward.  Lower numbers are indicative of non-nuts (just
owning a quartz watch puts you at about 5, at least if you care about
its accuracy).

     Dave