[time-nuts] modern electronics education/jobs (was:

2015-11-14 Thread Mark Sims
When I was in high school (early 1970's) I designed and built my own alarm clock out of TTL... (none of that sticking the guts of a commercial alarm clock in a pencil case that get kids arrested today). Also built my first computer by interfacing a TV Typewriter to a calculator chip. I was wel

[time-nuts] Thunderbolt "osc age alarm", where to get replacement oscillator?

2015-11-14 Thread Mark Sims
My bet is was just a power glitch or a corrupted message that raised the alarm and that your unit is OK. If the error reoccurs then you may have a hardware problem. There is an undocumented message that you can send to the unit to set the allowed range of the EFC signal. Default for the Tbolt

[time-nuts] 3GHz prescaler for Pendulum counters

2015-11-14 Thread Arthur Dent
Just a note to say that I bought one of these prescaler boards for my CNT-81. One problem is the way the board mounts in the CNT-81 the "in" connector is toward the back instead of toward the front like some of the other counters and I had to make a longer input cable. Pawel does now know this and

Re: [time-nuts] modern electronics education/jobs (was:

2015-11-14 Thread Bob Camp
Hi Ok, I believe I first heard this “the kids don’t know nothing” story back in the early to mid 1960’s. Pretty much the same comments. Kids out of school never saw a soldering iron ever. All they know is theory, nothing practical. If only it was like the “good old days”. Back then we put the a

Re: [time-nuts] modern electronics education/jobs (was:

2015-11-14 Thread Tim Shoppa
When I got to a fancy school where they build satellites, I thought for sure my soldering iron skills would be useful for doing all the fancy stuff. But no! The satellites were built by a team of highly skilled ladies who looked completely down on the amateurish skills of us wannabes. And I includ

Re: [time-nuts] modern electronics education/jobs (was:

2015-11-14 Thread Ray Xu
Hi guys, Your mostly-lurking EE (and, recently, also physics) undergraduate student here. You guys make me feel nostalgic for my young age of almost-legal-to-drink-in-the-US! I wish I can reply to all of you one by one but I'd rather not clog the mailing list with more off-topic discussion. (Fe

Re: [time-nuts] Thunderbolt "osc age alarm", where to get replacement oscillator?

2015-11-14 Thread Bob Camp
Hi > On Nov 14, 2015, at 8:01 AM, Pete Stephenson wrote: > > On Sat, Nov 14, 2015 at 12:00 AM, Bob Camp wrote: >> Hi >> >> First thing to check is that it really *is* at limit. There apparently are a >> few odd things >> that can trigger the alarm. > > What sort of odd things might cause tha

Re: [time-nuts] Downsizing dilemma, HP 3335A

2015-11-14 Thread Bill Byrom
I started at Tektronix as a field Application Engineer in 1987 and 28 years later I am still in that job position. I was not required to work in production, but in field sales we are working directly with engineers and technicians in their labs measuring signals on their boards, so we are very clos

Re: [time-nuts] Time syncing WiFi routers using FM radio

2015-11-14 Thread Bill Byrom
An improved technique using the 3.579(54) MHz NTSC color burst frequency distribution was described in this NBS circular a year or so later (1972, believe): http://tf.boulder.nist.gov/general/pdf/1601.pdf I was a General class ham (then WA5ZBJ) just entering the UT Austin EE school in 1972. I ha

Re: [time-nuts] Thunderbolt "osc age alarm", where to get replacement oscillator?

2015-11-14 Thread Pete Stephenson
On Sat, Nov 14, 2015 at 12:00 AM, Bob Camp wrote: > Hi > > First thing to check is that it really *is* at limit. There apparently are a > few odd things > that can trigger the alarm. What sort of odd things might cause that? It was weird: yesterday LH highlighted the DAC value which was around