[time-nuts] GPSDO & Crystal Aging

Richard (Rick) Karlquist richard at karlquist.com
Fri Apr 11 14:14:20 EDT 2014


On 4/11/2014 11:04 AM, Hal Murray wrote:

> How many would you need?  Is 3 enough?
>
> How well could you do with several low(er) cost oscillators relative to one
> good but expensive one?  It might be an interesting experiment in a nutty
> sort of way.
>

My guess would be 3 would be a minimum, so you
could have a majority vote.  Len Cutler's group
actually built an experimental ensemble of 9 or
10, but it didn't seem to come to fruition.
For this to make any sense, you would need to be
able to cherry pick 9 or 10 really good oscillators.
However, there was no way to get the production
line to sign on to this.

David Allan had
this interesting concept to the effect that if
you had a sufficient number of wristwatches
(maybe 1000) and you averaged them together
you could somehow get a quality clock, or at
least 31.6 times better.  Kind of like the
notion of 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters...

Rick


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