[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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