Jim;

By any chance were you in the Air Force? You mentioned Radar Site. Grounded tips - yes - that was a real problem. The power of a little old "wood burner"! :)

By the way I put our Cesium on a huge Nicad battery pack - used to start 737 Aircraft. That 15 minute thing that came with the original unit was unreal!

My story about Trimble Navigation.

Being a Metrology engineer, I knew many others in my profession. One such person worked at HP, and was a mentor of mine. He introduced me to a friend who was at one time an HP project engineer. The engineer had built a GPS receiver and HP did not want to build it. He had two friends at Trimble (very small – about 6 people at that time) who were interested and also came from HP. The engineer went to HP and asked if he could have the patent and HP agreed. He quit HP and went to work for Trimble and we had many sessions together, while others were getting the three satellites (at that time) to work with some degree of reliability. One day everything came together and I would go over to Trimble to visit the engineer and see what he was up to. Then the first GPS Receiver was produced by Trimble.

A few days later our Cesium Clock went south and we did not have the budget to replace it. This could have meant the loss of a huge government contract and the loss of hundrads of jobs at our company. I went to our VP (also an engineer) and explained the problem. I suggested a replacement device – a GPS receiver from Trimble Navigation. The VP got the money and we got the receiver. Less that one month later the engineer at Trimble called me and said, “Tom, we just gave marketing to an external company. The first thing they did was to more than double the price of the receiver you bought a few weeks ago”.

As you may know Trimble went from a small office to many buildings in Sunnyvale, California, where I live.

With GPS you could measure time and frequency to a very high degree of accuracy.

Tom


>OK. This clock has a short term internal battery backup that is dripping inside the cabinet. Imagine the mess. Well, since we ran an external battery pack, and experienced many power shortages, the 15 minutes of backup became crucial. So, I decide to replace the battery.
>
>I grab the dikes, screwdriver, and soldering iron. Slide the rack out, open the bottom cover and cut out the old battery. Pop in the new battery. Solder up the ground lead. When I touched the iron to the hot lead, there was a minute spark followed by a loud bang and a complete blackout. Yep, a grounded tip iron had brought down an entire radar site. 6 hours later...
>
>>>HP cesium beam by any chance? Have I got a story...
>>
>>Jim;
>>
>>Yes. Tell me your story and I will tell you about GPS and Trimble Navigation.
>>
>>Tom