Notebook of Time and Frequency Experiments
I was lucky enough to find an HP 5061B cesium standard with what I think is a virtually new high performance (option 004) tube. These are rare because the high performance tubes burn up their cesium supply much more quickly…
I set my HP 5065A Rubidium standard to the 5071A. Unlike a Cesium clock, the Rubidium system does have some drift so it needs to be tweaked occasionally. I plan to come back to this post every few months to…
I compared my old HP 5061A cesium standard against a much newer HP 5071A with high performance tube. Cesium standards are tweaked by adjust an electromagnet in the tube; this adjustment is called the "C Field." In the 5061A you…
This is the first of several boring posts where I'm documenting the offset of a couple of my frequency standards so that I can come back later and determine aging rate. This is my Oscilloquartz 8607-008 BVA quartz oscillator. I…
In Part 1 I described some background about SDR dynamic range as an introduction to the measurements I did on a RTL-SDR.com v3 USB "dongle" SDR. Now for the results. I wrote a Gnu Radio program to help measure the…
I'm using several USB "dongle" SDR sticks from RTL-SDR.com. These nifty $20 devices can receive from 100 kHz to above 1700 MHz. They have a low noise amplifier in the front end that is adjustable from 0 to about 50…
I've continued processing the data generated from software-defined-radio recordings I made during the 2017 solar eclipse at my fairly isolated and low-RF-noise location on Beaver Island, Michigan (45 38 38 N, 85 29 24 W, grid square EN75gp). The nearest…
I set up a smaller version of my mad-scientist stuff at our cottage on Beaver Island, Michigan (45 38 38 N, 85 29 24 W, grid square EN75gp), to record the RF spectrum before, during, and after the eclipse on…
It wasn't too hard for the HamSci guys to convince me to bring a Cesium frequency standard to my portable location in Michigan to drive the HPSDR receiver that will do band recordings for the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse HF…
I was fussing about signal generator output accuracy because I wanted to calibrate my HPSDR Hermes software defined radio ("SDR") so that I could calculate the absolute power input in dBm, assuming a 50 ohm load impedance) based on the…