Port-vax archive

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index][Old Index]

Re: PSA: Clock drift and pkgin



On 2023-12-13 22:52, Mouse wrote:
But a drift of a couple of % would not be unexpected.
Um, yes, it would be unexpected.
The crystal spec in that era was 0.01%, [...]

If you see a couple % drift, that's definitely not the crystal.

I'm not so sure.

My experience is that older machines keep worse time than newer ones,
even high-quality older machines and cheapo newer ones.  I suspect that
crystal frequencies drift with time (or perhaps with something that
tends to correlate positively with time, such as wide temperature
ranges in storage).

Chrystals age, and over time get farther from the nominal frequency. They also deviate based on temperature. And a bit on load. So I would say more than 100ppm is definitely more or less to be expected.

But I might have exaggerated a little when I said "several percent". :-)

But just pull up the data sheet for any modern crystal, and you'll find what the expected deviation will be based on both time and age. (Well, actually, for age they usually just say what to expect the first year, after that there isn't much...)

  Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt%softjar.se@localhost             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol


Home | Main Index | Thread Index | Old Index