Oscillator precision and marking on Fox crystals?

It means that it complies with the Fox standard for marking frequency on that size oscillator.

Look around their website - the through-hole canned oscillators usually show six digits after the decimal point.

(Although you will also find 0.5ppb OCXO's that only have three decimal points.)

My conclusion is that the number of decimal points has nothing to do with accuracy or precision, and everything to do with the space available on the can.

Tim.

Bummer - I would have expected more from engineers. They would have flunked any science class in my high school, let alone college.

When I was in high school, students would do their labs and take measurements with meters, scales, balances, etc that had two or three significant digits at best. Then they'd punch them into their calculators and put results on their lab reports with eight or ten decimal places. Completely bogus ...

My chemistry teacher was especially a fussbudget about it. Failure to carry the correct number of significant digits was an automatic zero score on that question. For that matter, so was failure to carry the units all the way thru the calculations.

'Guess I'm officially a curmudgeon :-)

Bob

Bob,

This wasn't a problem when I was in high school. Slide rules don't give you more than three digits of precision. I can still remember taking a test using my HP-35 calculator in college and writing down 2.9999999 as the answer before I realized that the answer really was 3.0.