[time-nuts] Thinking outside the box a super reference

Bob Camp kb8tq at n1k.org
Thu Nov 3 16:54:24 EDT 2016


Hi

Since you can *buy* a working Rb that runs to a given level. My assumption is that
the objective is to do something that is significantly better than you can get for $100
or less.  I see no point in setting up to build a device that it 10X worse and costs 10X
more money. 

Making the physics package of a good Rb takes a lot of custom tooling. It also takes
a bunch of engineering experiments to get the process running on that tooling, You 
also need to train the operators on how to do this or that with the setup.  If good performance
is the goal, you probably need some sort of quality process backing it all up. 

If you look at a modern CPU as “just a handful of sand and some stuff”, it seems
pretty easy to build one in the kitchen after an hour or two of setup. When you dig
into the nasty details the line costs rapidly spiral off into the stratosphere. Atomic 
standards are not quite as complex, but there still is more than just a little custom 
equipment involved. $1M sounds a bit on the low side of what it might take. 

Bob

> On Nov 3, 2016, at 4:37 PM, Ruslan Nabioullin <rnabioullin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 11/03/2016 04:07 PM, Bert Kehren via time-nuts wrote:
>> 
>> Over the past there has been talk about building from  scratch high
>> performance references. I think consensus was that it is out of  reach.
> 
> What about instead establishing an open-source hardware project for a frequency standard fusor?  I was researching COTS solutions for this for my rubidium ensemble and could only find this one product, which obviously should be exorbitant in cost: http://vremya-ch.com/english/product/indexe817.html?Razdel=11&Id=54
> 
> -Ruslan
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