HP 5061A Cesium Clock [video]
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HP 5061A Cesium Clock [video]
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: HP 5061A Cesium Clock [video]
#2Amazing piece of technology. Its successor, the 5071A (now made by microsemi) is still the most common primary frequency standard. HP used to be such a great company. Now they make crappy consumer printers and network cables with DRM chips.
Re: HP 5061A Cesium Clock [video]
#3I find this video quite interesting.
I had no idea how Cesium clocks work, other than the SI definition of a second is 9xxxx transitions between two states of a cesium atom.
Re: HP 5061A Cesium Clock [video]
#4I find this video quite interesting. I had no idea how Cesium clocks work, other than the SI definition of a second is 9xxxx transitions between two states of a cesium atom.
"Transition frequency" seems to be a common source of confusion here. In the context of the SI definition it means "frequency corresponding to the energy difference between the two states". This is the frequency of radiation that can _most efficiently_ drive transitions between the states. How fast the atom transitions between the states depends on the frequency, polarization, and power of the driving radiation and can in principle take any value. To avoid confusion this is called the "Rabi frequency" in atomic physics.
Re: HP 5061A Cesium Clock [video]
#5Amazing piece of technology. Its successor, the 5071A (now made by microsemi) is still the most common primary frequency standard. HP used to be such a great company. Now they make crappy consumer printers and network cables with DRM chips.
HP spun off the good parts in 1999 to form Agilent. The Test Equipment division was spun off in 2014 as Keysight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keysight
Re: HP 5061A Cesium Clock [video]
#6Re: HP 5061A Cesium Clock [video]
#7Amazing piece of technology. Its successor, the 5071A (now made by microsemi) is still the most common primary frequency standard. HP used to be such a great company. Now they make crappy consumer printers and network cables with DRM chips.
These things used to be critical elements in optical transmission for circuit switched telephone networks (SONNET/SDH). The old "5 9's" Reliability commitment ment your Stratum clock was working across the whole ring. Now you just throw a GPS antenna on every base station !
Re: HP 5061A Cesium Clock [video]
#8Amazing piece of technology. Its successor, the 5071A (now made by microsemi) is still the most common primary frequency standard. HP used to be such a great company. Now they make crappy consumer printers and network cables with DRM chips.
These things used to be critical elements in optical transmission for circuit switched telephone networks (SONNET/SDH). The old "5 9's" Reliability commitment ment your Stratum clock was working across the whole ring. Now you just throw a GPS antenna on every base station !
You still need low phase noise local oscillators. Both atomic standards and GPSDOs use ovenized crystal oscillators (double ovenized if they’re fancy).
It blows my mind that at the end of the day, the lowest noise method of single frequency electrical signal generation we have is a mechanical system.
Re: HP 5061A Cesium Clock [video]
#9Amazing piece of technology. Its successor, the 5071A (now made by microsemi) is still the most common primary frequency standard. HP used to be such a great company. Now they make crappy consumer printers and network cables with DRM chips.
Hey, we also make pretty cool 3D printers and industrial printing presses, save up your milk money and buy one of those to change your mind about hp!
Re: HP 5061A Cesium Clock [video]
#10Great video, bonus I learned how spectrometry works!