>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"! :)
>

Subcontractor to the same. 10 Megawatt space surveillance stuff. Loss of clock=loss of timing=loss of transmitter=boom. Replace all diodes in duplexer. Reset the clock from Loran. What a pain. When we got GPS, it kinda took the fun out of it.

>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!
>

No kidding. We could get around 3-4 hours total, but that was a stretch. Everyone got a bit nervous until we could get shore power back.

>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.
>

Wow. HP really missed the ball on that one. "If I only knew then..."

>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.
>

Great story. I wonder how much other technology walked out their doors?

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

We used to do very well with the cesium. When the boys from Ohio showed up yearly with the 'flying clock' to do their reset, we used to joke about them flying half way around the world to set THEIR clock. We could maintain under 10 usec with a decent clock - a couple orders of magnitude better than required by the system. A couple of judicious adjustments every couple of months and we knew where it was running.