[Coco] Meanwhile, as talks of the CoCo 4 progress...

[gene heskett]

On Friday, November 19, 2010 01:49:52 pm Sean did opine:

> Wow, nixie tubes... Neato!

Yes, and 2 decades extinct, which makes working ones sell for a 
considerable premium.  I retired a perfect good but goofy display 
HP-52something counter over 20 years ago now because of failing nixies.
Precision-wise, those things could sit and hold a zero-beat with WWWV (or 
whatever the 10 MHZ signal from Colorado Springs was called) for weeks at a 
time, gaining and losing a few cycles a day as the altitude of the skip 
varied in the daily cycle.  As a standard generator, it was more stable 
than comparing the local sync generators subcarrier to a satellite signal 
because the satellite moves in a bigger figure 8 than the tropo did.  If I 
wanted to really tweak ours because we didn't have a rubidium standard 
master oscillator, I would have to call that bird TOC and find out what time 
of the day was the min or max altitude of that bird.  Some of them moved so 
fast in the middle of the figure 8 that they were actually right at the 10hz 
tolerance the commission allowed.  Couple that with some of the early 
uplinkers running on a shoestring that wasn't even tied, and I had 
witnessed the vectorscope rotating at speeds fast enough to qualify as a 
test circle.
 
> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 6:21 AM, Rogelio Perea <os9dude at gmail.com> wrote:
> > http://tinyurl.com/28mjtdx
> > 
> > Not my auction BTW :-)
> > 
> > 
> > -- RP*
> > *
> > 
> > --
> > Coco mailing list
> > Coco at maltedmedia.com
> > http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
> 
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


-- 
Cheers, Gene
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