[time-nuts] Time-nut gettogether in Boulder

[Tom Knox]

After following posts for a number of years I have learned the Time-Nuts community are not only a good source of knowledge but more important a great group of people. But even knowing that I am a bit overwhelmed after personally meeting several Time Nuts.  Of coure this is common knowledge to may of you long time members. That said the chance to get to know Magnus, David, John, and locals Hank and Skip has left me thinking..... 
In my humble opinion it would be great to put together an annual gathering of the Time and Freq Community, perhaps in conjunction with NIST's annual Seminar. If the time I have spent with Magnus and the other visiting Time-Nuts is any indication I  think a Time-Nuts gathering would quickly develop into the must attend event for people serious about time but the fantastic people researching it. I see this evolving not only a social gathering, but also a place for professions and amateurs to could showcase ideas and products. 
Best Wishes;

Thomas Knox

1-303-554-0307

> Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2012 14:15:41 +0200
> From: magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org
> To: time-nuts at febo.com
> Subject: [time-nuts] Time-nut gettogether in Boulder
> 
> Fellow time-nuts,
> 
> It was a great pleasure to meet up with fellow time-nuts Tom Knox, Hank 
> (didn't get his last name unfortunatly), David Bengtson, Skip Withrow 
> and John Miles. We had a nice dinner together after the Symmetricom 
> open-house event. Good folks all over.
> 
> The Symmetricom event was very nice. They had a 5071A feeding a 
> distribution amp they built that then fed two inputs of one of their 
> TSC5125A. Lovely gear, wish I had one (of each). Sam Stein was hanging 
> around, got some tricky questions and I got to talk to him a little. I 
> asked him about that ATAN issue he had written about in one of his 
> papers, but he gave a good answer in that it wasn't as much the ATAN as 
> integrating issues after it, which for short intervals gave really bad 
> values regardless. He realized that maybe the wording didn't came out 
> right in that part, but ah well. Now I know at least.
> 
> During dinner John passed one of his TimePods around and we all got to 
> see it live. I now got mine from him, and John was kind enough to demo 
> it on his little portable lab, even if he was sleep depraved and 
> jet-lagged from his travel. Now I have a TimePod, and wants to play 
> around more with it... if I only could find the lab in the walking or 
> driving distance from here... :)
> 
> The first day of the conference have been good, folks like David Allan, 
> Mark Weiss and David Howe has been presenting, among other good 
> presenters. For most part, the first day have been a rather thorough 
> walk-through of the basics, even if they had to skip pages in the 
> presentation. For my own part, it has been more of a repetition coarse 
> so far, but good to see that it comes together like I suspected it to. 
> What I take with me as the biggest new thing was really the mechanism 
> behind flicker noise,
> 
> Getting to talk to Dr. Allan is also great, he is a friendly guy. We had 
> good exchange, and he loved my work on the Allan Deviation article on 
> Wikipedia. I got a chance to verify some of the points that I feel is 
> important, such as separation of noise and systematic effects, and that 
> the definition of the scale shall not be confused with the form of the 
> estimators (non-overlapping, overlapping, Hadamard, TOTALDEV, Theo etc.) 
> once bias-corrections have been done. He fully agreed with this, and he 
> seemed very happy that I paid attention to those details. He was a bit 
> annoyed with the state of the Modified Allan Deviation article, and I 
> confessed that I had started it but not fixed errors and completed it. 
> He seemed impressed by the amounts of hours that must had gone in to 
> writing it.
> 
> I really enjoyed all the presentations, and it feels like a very nice 
> event overall. I'll report on further developments.
> 
> I must also send out many thanks to Tom Knox, who has been a top notch 
> host to me the last couple of days.
> 
> I look forward to go out and visit Hank and his lab.
> 
> Now, a shower, breakfast and then day 2 of the NIST Time and Frequency 
> Seminars.
> 
> Cheers,
> Magnus
> 
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