On 9/21/13 5:41 AM, Bob Camp wrote:
Hi
I'd be a bit surprised if they were running anything as power hungry as an Rb
all the time when a quartz based device would be smaller / lower power / lower
volume. Of course they may have had mission requirements that drive them to a
hydrogen maser ...
Quartz is king..
either a TCXO or maybe an OCXO or USO
But this is why the Deep Space Atomic Clock (a trapped Hg+ ion clock) is
so interesting. It has the potential of beating the USO in performance,
size, mass, and delivery lead time.
A USO takes a long time to build. You need to get a bunch of crystals
and oscillators and run them to see what the aging characteristics are, etc.
An atomic standard doesn't have the "carefully selected crystal" issue.
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