[time-nuts] Airraft Ping Timing

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Tue Mar 25 18:43:41 EDT 2014


On 3/25/14 11:38 AM, J. Forster wrote:
> Could well be. I never saw the bird, of course. The portable ground
> station was roughly the same size as an OD Manpak radio of the period and
> read out Lat/Long on LED digital readouts. In retrospect, it may have been
> in the early 1980s.
>

Transit, transmitted signals at 400 MHz.  Had really high performance 
Quartz oscillators on board (in a dewar, etc.) made by APL.  those 
oscillators became the basis of the Ultrastable oscillators we use in 
space now.  From an oscillator standpoint, not a whole lot different 
than back then.

There's a whole lot of attention paid to how the crystal is mounted, 
what the aging characteristic is, etc.

USO manufacture is definitely a way to be paid to be a time-nut, because 
that's what it's really about.  Finding all the possible ways that might 
degrade it and driving them all as small as possible.



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