[sdiy] Trying to establish confidence in my test equipment

[Gene Stopp]

Whoa - yeah I was trying to get away from Cesium clocks and stuff like
that...

How about a chip like the MAX6176?


- Gene
 


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
[mailto:owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl] On Behalf Of Tom Arnold
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 3:35 PM
To: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
Subject: Re: [sdiy] Trying to establish confidence in my test equipment

On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 02:43:05PM -0800, Gene Stopp wrote:
> I know that calibration needs to be compared to a standard somewhere.
Doing
> it on your own invokes all kinds of chicken-and-egg dilemmas. Is there any
> physical process readily available that can provide a guaranteed voltage
> calibration reference? Something like "mix chemical A with chemical B with
> copper and zinc electrodes and the differential will be 1.20998 volts". 

http://nvl.nist.gov/pub/nistpubs/sp958-lide/315-318.pdf

My brain started to hurt when I hit the second page.

I have a little 5 volt reference I made using a crystal oven and an HP
precision voltage source.  I'm lucky that I have a local shop (
http://www.equiptek.com/ ) that can do NIST tracable calibration.  I just
drove it over there and he checked the calibration. Once it warms up ( 30 
minutes ) its rock solid at 5.0000 volts and it cost more to calibrate 
( $20 ) then to build ( $5 in swapmeet parts ).