YHK - yet another hacker news clone

this already is a 20yo site or so. why the hype today?

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There's a lot of interesting stuff in the time-nut world. There's a fun mailing list at https://time-nuts.febo.narkive.com/ and Jeff Geerling has been doing a lot of stuff with clocks lately on YouTube. An interesting intro project is to set up a GPSDO and track the long-term aging of an OXCO or Rubidium standard (many of which are surplused out of telecom applications for somewhat reasonable prices on eBay).

Also vaguely related, the precision clock kit by Mitxela - https://mitxela.com/shop/clock4

Then there's the EFOS3 Hydrogen Maser by https://www.efos3.com/

There is a very deep rabbithole in here.

So, I originally posted this a while back when I was hip-deep in nano-second level time measurement and learning every day how little I knew about this field. We all take for granted that there are a billion nano seconds in a second and that in theory you can count those one-by-one if you have a precise enough oscillator but to actually have stability good enough to track the effects of sub-cycle changes to radio signals (phase changes) is not all that simple. Especially when the measurements themselves run over a day or more.

I eventually got it all to work 'in the lab' but nowhere near stable or accurate enough for a real life application. This was all done at very low radio frequencies with super low radiated power (under the license limits) and that of course complicated matters greatly.

The big game changer was to get hold of an atomic clock that I could run locally. That takes the sting out of synchronizing with external sources and using a relatively affordable SDR I was finally able to do this with enough precision to be able to differentiate between the ground conducted signal and the 'airwave' for one of the EU atomic clocks (DCF-77). It was really neat to see the effect of the day/night cycle on the propagation of the signal (exactly as predicted) as validation.

Thank you! I've had the idea of aquiring an atomic clock in the back of my head for a while now and I'm glad to see there's a like-minded community out there. I'm not even sure what I'd do with it except measure time dilation effects.