GPS locking a Rubidium Time Reference

In this article, I’ll discuss the implementation of a GPS stabilized 10Mhz. reference clock. For my requirements, the rubidium clock is a Stanford Research FS-275, which can be phase locked to a 1 pps reference. This is further GPS stabilized by coupling a GPS time receiver 1pps sync pulse to the rubidium clock 1pps input. This is primarily for correcting long term drift in precision timing applications. The rubidium crystal will age at a rate ~5e-9 long term, which can be improved to ~1e-12 by using GPS lock.

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