Erik,
No sense calibrating a $100 Chinese counter with a GPSDO. The OXCO will do for that. A lot depends upon how this is done, mailing or meeting. Calibrating a 5386A needs a GSPDO
People with lots of high kit need very different facilities from someone with a sub $1000 lab suite from China.
I don't know of a means for making stable, physically small precision inductors. I have a bunch of large air core inductors, but all are large and would be heavy when properly packaged a la GR practice.
I think that starting with some local meetups in the UK or elsewhere would be very beneficial in figuring out what is needed.
I'd consider one of Leo's BNC pulsers essential kit along with a noise source to give the actual shape of the DSO AFE filter on FFT equipped scopes. There is also the DIY instrument cal problem.
I'm quite amused by the response here as my suggestions in the USA Cal Club were not of interest.
On Wednesday, December 20, 2023 at 09:54:28 AM CST, Erik Kaashoek <erik@...> wrote:
Reg,
Maybe it is good to be explicit on accuracy ambition level for the RF cal club.
As examples:
For some people a frequency reference using an OCXO which have been tuned to 10MHz and is shipped cold that will reach 1e-9 accuracy in an hour is sufficient.
For others that aim below 1e-11, such an OCXO it is not relevant.
Dr Kirkby (just as an example) may require a different level of accuracy for his VNA calibration sets compared to someone that occasionally wants to measure the SWR of an antenna using a simple reflection bridge.
Same is true for all the other items I mentioned.
If we want to get to a hub/spoke or round shipping of such a set of references, would it make sense to investigate/list for each reference what accuracy is reachable in an easily shippable form?
Once that is done you can check interest in joining such an exchange of references.
Put all references in a container that is still in an acceptable shipping cost bracket and you can calculate the cost for someone to participate. If the container is not too big, intercontinental participation would be possible.
