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However, the one that was recovered from the ATF lab is no longer locking to the Rubidium reference frequency, although it was locked at the time we disconnected it from the ATF lab. I emailed the support staff at SRS, who seem to think that either the internal oscillator has drifted too far, or the Rb lamp is dead. Either ways, it needs to be repaired. They suggested that I run a check by issuing some serial commands to the unit to determine which of these is actually the problem, but I've been having some trouble setting up the serial link - I will try this again tomorrow.
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The Rubidium standard we had sent in for repair and recalibration has come back. I checked the following:
- Powered the unit on - it was locked to the internal rubidium reference within a few minutes as prescribed in the manual.
- After it had locked to the internal reference, I checked that it was able to lock to an external 1pps reference from our GPS timing unit- this too was achieved within a few minutes as prescribed in the manual.
However, I am still having trouble setting up a serial communications link with the FS725 with a USB-serial adaptor - I've tried with a Raspberry Pi and my Mac (using screen to try and connect), and also using one of the old Windows laptops lying around on which I was able to install the native software supplied by SRS (still using the USB-serial adaptor to establish connection though). Could it be that the unit is incompatible with the USB-serial adaptor? I had specifically indicated in the repair request that this was also a problem. In any case, this doesn't seem to be crucial, though it would have been nice for diagnostics purposes in the future...
I've stored the repaired FS725 inside the electronics cabinet (marked "Eletronics Modules") for now (the other unit was returned to Antonio in W. Bridge some weeks ago). |