[time-nuts] GPSDO & Crystal Aging

Brooke Clarke brooke at pacific.net
Thu Apr 10 16:55:45 EDT 2014


Hi Tom:

That makes sense because the GPS was just coming on line and not anywhere near a full compliment of satellites and SA 
was on.
HP had some way around SA that improved the timekeeping.
Has that ever been disclosed?

Have Fun,

Brooke Clarke
http://www.PRC68.com
http://www.end2partygovernment.com/2012Issues.html

Tom Van Baak wrote:
> Hi Brooke,
>
> True, except that in most cases the long-term frequency drift rate is so tiny compared to all the short- and mid-term instability that it is not worth worrying about. In other words, I agree it is modeled as a "linear ramp", but the ramp, even at huge timescales, is so close to flat, what's the point?
>
> Look at the output of a typical OCXO. Short-term the frequency varies by tens or hundreds of ps/s; that's parts in 10^11 or 10^10. By contrast, you have wait an entire day or week before you get that level of frequency error due to drift.
>
> When you're in a rowboat outside SF bay, it's the 3 m waves every 5 to 10 seconds that you need to steer against, not the 3 m tides that occur gradually over 12 hours.
>
> Can someone show me a counter-example? Why is it better to include aging rate into the PID. What quantitative improvement in performance does this actually represent? I don't disbelieve it, I just have never seen the numbers.
>
> One case where knowing the aging rate is important is during multi-hour or multi-day holdover. Perhaps that's why HP included the 128-hour circular record of frequency/aging into their firmware.
>
> /tvb
>
>> Hi:
>>
>> AFAICR the HP GPSDOs included the idea of measuring the aging rate of the crystal and applying that correction during
>> holdover.
>> This was also mentioned by Brooks Shera in relation to his GSPDO (there was a plot), but I don't think it was part of
>> the firmware?
>>
>> So rather than just locking the control voltage to the last used value it would be much better to add a linear ramp.
>> <http://www.rt66.com/%7Eshera/>
>
>
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