Hello,
"There are no ?wear-out? or ?use-up? mechanisms in a Datum Efratom Rubidium oscillator." (..)But also: "Unlike a quartz crystal oscillator which has no clearly-defined "wear out" period and, if well-designed, can actually improve as time goes on, a Rubidium reference has a definite lifetime associated with its lamp: (..) so maybe both points of view are correct? (..)
Yes, both of the points bear some meaning. The Rb does not age substantially by means of long-term frequency variation, unlike typical quartz.
However, the Rb lamp is maintained hot (~100Celsius in LPRO-101) and contains aggresive light metal, therefore one day the glass will "wear out" and the lamp does not shine enough or shine at all. The Rb synthesis circuit will be able to detect such a situation and you are at least informed, that thigs went wrong.
Of course, there are other minor circuit elements inside of the Rb clock, which may vary in long term -- eg. magnetic field bias regulator, output buffer. But these do not age systematically with predictable sign and magnitude.
Regards, Marek
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