Applications like telecommunication infrastructure, TV broadcasts, global navigation satellite systems, aerospace and defense sector applications require highly precise amplitude and frequency oscillation cycle.
A Rubidium Oscillator is an atomic clock which derives its stability from the intrinsic stability of the rubidium ground state hyperfine resonance. Most rubidium devices will have a frequency offset of less than 0.1 ppb directly “out of the box”. Most rubidium devices will have a frequency accuracy of less than ±0.5 (5E-11) directly “out of the box”.
They are very stable and once they are “calibrated” or “disciplined” using a known good reference (traceable to a primary reference source), they create wonderful telecommunications clocks. They are excellent holdover oscillators (<1.5usec.) because of their stability. For many applications, such as the calibration of the internal OCXO in counters, spectrum analyzers, and communications test systems, this provides more than an order of magnitude margin in every parameter.
The excellent stability also allows the clock to act as a very narrow-band filtering clock. Filter time constants of the order of days can be implemented if the oscillator is a rubidium because of the stability. Therefore it can filter out essentially all accumulated wander on the reference. In contrast, quartz oscillators, even expensive ones, will provide stratum-1 quality holdover only for a few hours.
Rubidium devices also act as excellent firewalls. A rubidium oscillator cannot be made to change its frequency by very much; typically ±2ppb ppm offset at from absolute truth, and therefore cannot be steered very wrong in the event of a reference going “rogue”. The equivalent limit for quartz is about ±0.5ppm at 10MHz.
Our Rubidium oscillators provide cost-effective, compact, and long lasting stable reference signal equipment for precision test and measurement applications, telecommunications, advanced communications, navigation and targeting systems.
Our RMRO-10M-Sf-LN-c5 Low Noise Rubidium Oscillator Module is a sub miniature atomic clock combined with ‘active noise filter’ technology. This rubidium oscillator has 100x less drift than OCXO’s. With short term stability of 2×10‐12/s @ 100s this rubidium oscillator provides significant improvement in performance over other rubidium component.
These and other models are available from the Raditek website.