[time-nuts] HG 414A Rubidium

[Magnus Danielson]

Fellow time-nuts,

Today a new box entered the lab, a Götting KG HG 414A. This is not of 
German origin, but is in fact a Soviet/Russian TSCH1-78. I've got SN 052 
made in 1992, but the manual seems to be written in 1986.

Manuals is some form of copy method I just can't recall right now, but 
stencil looks possible.

Mine comes with complete electrical and mechanical drawings, calibration 
manual with nice stamps . All that in russian. There is also some 
manuals translated into german which helps me a lot in the basic get 
started operation, even if my german is close to non-existent.

It is in good shape, even if a quick look at the waveforms shows that 
some improvement can be achieved. It locks and operates relatively well 
straight out of the box.

So, what does it do?

It has a Rubidium reference in it. A 5 MHz OCXO which synthesize into 90 
MHz and 5,31746 MHz which then is mixed in the cavity to 6,83468254 GHz 
with a 86,8 Hz phase-modulation for resonance sweep.

It has a lock-indicator on the front and also a trimmer for OCXO 
adjustment with indicators of direction to turn.

With that in hand, it generates 10 MHz, 5 MHz, 1 MHz and 100 kHz sine 
outputs.

It further takes a 5 MHz input and measures it's frequency over one 
second with 1E-11 resolution or over 10 or 100 s with 1E-12 resolution.
It shows 7 digit numbers. It essentially mix down to 500 Hz, 50 Hz or 5 
Hz and measures. Works nicely.

It can also measure time-differences, and thus relates to the time it 
has. It is fairly easy to set up the time of day in HH MM SS and it 
looks like you can take a PPS and time-align it to it. Then you can 
measure that time-difference. It also has a delayed output which is 
programmable in 100 ns steps.

So, this box is a bit of everything, but a rather nice one.

The DC connector is unknown to me, but the AC is a standard IEC one, so 
that took no time to hook up.

It will take some time to fully understand it, but who said it would be 
easy?

I need to brush up my russian and german... ah well.

I use a TADD-2 for wave-cleanup, but it only achieves it partly.

Cheers,
Magnus