FY 2019 budget requests shutdown of NIST time stations

John Larkin wrote

...

Clicking a mouse, well, some scientific exercise keeps those neurons in shape.

We live in a world where 'medical advice' and all sorts of recommendations by Big Brother are treating humans like the most stupid unbelievable idiot statistics student would.

Not everybody is the same, not everybody has the same metabolism, same neural net configuration. There is such an incredible lot of quack medical ideas let lose on the people, and then what? Every body too fat, no more sugar for everybody, run at least 2 miles a day, the nonsense, too much salt, too little salt, to much fat, do not eat this, not that...

I was reading 20,000 people died last year in Germany due to medical errors and faulty diagnosis, more than in traffic accidents? Who is accountable?? If you had a repair shop like that you would be out of business very quickly!

It is worse than in medieval times when they gave people mercury to 'fix' them.

And a big industry pushes one dangerous drug after the other. My opinion, I knew people that died because of medical errors.

Now they want to change the law there so you only have to pay doctors if the treatment was a 100 % success. Now that is a start, will clean up a lot I hope.

So, I have been using 60/40 solder since I was what was it? 4 years old. I must have died of lead poisoning ages ago it seems. Oh I used mercury too.

I used to cheat in training (told the story here I think), too much work.

Do what you feel is right, that is my advice.

Then get a GPS referenced oscillator. Like the

mini GPS reference clock.

Fine for portable work.

Of course. This whole "microsatellite designs consisting of stackable standard modules" idea was pioneered in the amateur satellite community at the university of Surrey (UK) and AMSAT NA.

Except that now we live twice as long.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Sure. Chack that a few times per week.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Yes, those are nice links:

99 and 150 dollars respectively. Looks like windows software though... Any idea what PLL they use? Maybe I already wrote the soft...

By now I have quite a bit of experience with GPS, no problem building one reference like that myself if needs arises, not even from the 1 pulse per second output of those cheap modules.

Have an ADF4350 module here, wrote the software for it, some other PLL boards..

My GPS based clock, radiation counter, and position + radiation logger for uranium prospecting:

My GPS controlled auto-pilot drone:

Just got a bunch of LMX2332 PLL chips in...

For the EsHail2 geosat project however my Rub-it-in standard will do fine, my RX dish positioner is fixed to the wall, so not portable. Got a nice 2.4 GHz amplifier for the upload ready too:

the dish for that for ATV will have to be bigger... but first the RX side.

Designing yourself is more fun and enables the next more complictiataiotiated project.

On a sunny day (Sun, 16 Sep 2018 03:28:11 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Lemme see, 10 MHz, 360 degrees

100 ns / 360 = 1E-7 / 360 = 2.77778e-10 so 278 ps You can easily see 1 degree on a lisajous if you adjust phase so you get a straight line at start, / / /

I run h264 recordings 24/7 of xgpspc app output. In the morning I fast-forward with ffplay to see if anything interesting happened, red alert field shows that clearly..

Else use a cheapo phase detector, old HC4040 will do :-) You can design it so some phase error triggers an alarm...

:-) Math???

Lots of the nano nano stuff is so much easier in the frequency domain. Especially with sine waves.

John Larkin wrote

Some do, some don't.

It also depends on where you live, in some place in Italy people get extremely old. US life expectancy is declining, in spite off all your drug companies doctors and what have you, sports ;-).

Errata: I wrote

4046 I meant.

It's now 78.74 and increasing. Keep away from street drugs and motorcycles and giant sodas, and you'll probably do better.

In 1800 half the kids born died of infectuous disease before adulthood.

Masses of kids and adults died of smallpox, TB, cholera, diptheria, malaria, yellow fever, strep, all sorts of awful stuff. Now almost nobody in civilized countries dies of infectuous disease. Cancer is usually detected and fixed. All sorts of terrible injuries are repaired. Blood pressure and various chemical imbalances are managed. And it's going to get a lot better.

Cipro has several times saved me from being dead, or wishing I was dead.

I agree that many doctors are rushed, some are mediocre or arrogant or dangerous, and about half of initial diagnoses are wrong. So manage your doctor as you would any other tool.

When I think a doctor isn't good enough, I replace her. When I have a problem, I research it as a crosscheck on my MDs. I was recently disgnosed with an incurable condition that I discovered was actually an allergy to a medicine and possibly to toothpaste; I'm still experimenting to be sure.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

A PPB delta-f is easily converted to time.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Just make sure the oscillators don't lock, just from being near one another.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Interesting statistic. Digging a little with Google, I find that the death rate in Germany in 2016 was 11 deaths per 1000 population or

1.1%. At the time, the total German population was 82.7 million. 1.1% of 82.7 million = 91,000 deaths. If 20,000 people died in Germany from medical mistakes, the accident rate for German medicine would be: 20,000 / 91,000 = 22% or 1 out of 5 deaths in Germany were caused by medical errors. Seems like a rather high percentage, especially if one reduces the 91,000 overall death figure to not include natural and accidental deaths.

By comparison, death by medical mistakes in the US is allegedly anywhere between 250,000 and 440,000 per year: Out of a population of 326 million, that would be 0.08% to 0.13% or 8 to 14 times better than Germany. Assuming that both Germany and the US have similar medical practices, such a large discrepancy would likely be attributable to data collection differences, statistical assumptions, or simply adjusting the numbers to fit whatever agenda the mathemagician is selling.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

John Larkin wrote

Sure, but we want to lock a 10 MHz oscillator to a 1 (or 10) pulse[s] per second source. the question is, in this case, is there any jitter in that pulse, so is it software generated and in what way.

There are many kind of PLL techniques, I have one in mind for this... In analog video everything revolves around PLLs, for example your color TV regeneration,

4.43 MHz here, 3.58 MHz in the US. In video tape recording there were > 3 PLLs to get from a mechanical rotating head to a few ns stable color carrier... I have designed an played a lot with that, so it could be a fun 'recall the old days' project. frequency lock, then phase lock, then very precise phase lock, variable delay lines... Not counting the tape servos and external references, timebase compensation, PAL P pulse, and what not.

But for now my rubidium reference will do. Likely more reliable than a GPS that comes and goes and can be jammed. Only need accurate frequency and stability.

John Larkin wrote

That is true of course.

Ciprofloxacin ?

Yep.

These day you can use the web to do some research on medicines. There are more and more cases of antibiotic resistant infections appearing however, so medics are more reluctant to subscribe antibiotics. Somehow I almost never have infections.. That is what I meant by 'not every body is the same'.

Now soon there will be head-transplants, the lower insured will get monkey heads.

John Larkin wrote

There would be only one 10 MHz oscillator, I was referring to the phase comparators in that chip. That 10 MHz oscillator will at least have to be a crystal based one, and temperature compensated.

LOL! And for many of them it will be an improvement! :-D

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Jeff Liebermann wrote

Yes I got the number from the teefee, so YMMV. Nevertheless it is horrible. And I am sure not all cases are reported...

A quick google confirms what teefee stated though:

That would be great. Then, the entire planet can switch to using UTC or GPS time (they're currently 18 seconds different) and totally dispose of those irritating time zones. Plenty of time scales to choose from: No one will ever need to ask what time is it half way around the globe because everyone will (hopefully) be on the same time scale.

My only problem with losing WWV is that my Heath GC-1000 Most Accurate Clock will probably need to be retired: I could probably setup a small WWV emulator in my shop and lock it to a GPSDO. There seem to be several WWVB emulators:

but I couldn't find one for WWV. (Yet another project).

There are a fairly small number of dedicated chips used to decode WWVB, DCF77, and others. I see mostly C-Max chips: but there are others. Simply identifying the chip and reading the data sheet should provide the necessary magic incantation, jumper setting, or button punching needed to set the time zone.

WWV at its best:

"Time is natures way of keeping everything from happening at once". I forgot from whom I stole that.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558