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God no they are a shit show. Having been an EE years ago I stopped reading any journals and research. 99.9% of it is garbage which is engineered to sell attenti

by hughrr 5y ago

God no they are a shit show. Having been an EE years ago I stopped reading any journals and research. 99.9% of it is garbage which is engineered to sell attention rather than a better future. Anything worth giving attention to turns up in EDN when a product comes to market after someone took it serious enough to actually invest in it. Then you pay attention. My favourite recent thing is chip scale atomic clocks: https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/clocks-frequency-references/3824-chip-scale-atomic-clock-csac https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/clocks-frequency... You can actually buy them!m Edit: the worst garbage is actually IET’s E&T Magazine. That’s horse dung.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> You can actually buy them! For $5,200. I wonder how many they sell. They would be useful in things like rangefinding and positioning (and maybe encrypted packet comms). Sounds like a military market.
- hughrr 5y ago
  Actually they’re $1750 for the module which is quite affordable if your hobby is timenuttery. http://www.leapsecond.com/ http://www.leapsecond.com/
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Fair ‘nuff. I probably misread the ordering page (renders like crap on mobile).
- wildzzz 5y ago
  They almost entirely are military market. A chipscale atomic clock is really only good for GPS-denied environments whether that means a UAV looking for a jammer or some very small device underwater that doesn't have room for a traditional rack mount time and reference frequency source. Space (civil and military) is another application where you may have a satellite that is not in optimal range of GPS satellites and may need a backup reference. There could be some mining and petro industry applications but again, something deep underwater or underground. Anything other situation and you'd have clear sky for GPS.
pwr-electronics 5y ago
I didn't really understand IEEE until I realized that they're more of an academic society than a professional society, despite what their marketing suggests. The academia mill is a weird way to fund training engineers for industry, and IEEE is just a forum for it.

by hughrr 5y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

> You can actually buy them! For $5,200. I wonder how many they sell. They would be useful in things like rangefinding and positioning (and maybe encrypted packet comms). Sounds like a military market.

hughrr 5y ago
Actually they’re $1750 for the module which is quite affordable if your hobby is timenuttery. http://www.leapsecond.com/ http://www.leapsecond.com/
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Fair ‘nuff. I probably misread the ordering page (renders like crap on mobile).
wildzzz 5y ago
They almost entirely are military market. A chipscale atomic clock is really only good for GPS-denied environments whether that means a UAV looking for a jammer or some very small device underwater that doesn't have room for a traditional rack mount time and reference frequency source. Space (civil and military) is another application where you may have a satellite that is not in optimal range of GPS satellites and may need a backup reference. There could be some mining and petro industry applications but again, something deep underwater or underground. Anything other situation and you'd have clear sky for GPS.

pwr-electronics 5y ago

I didn't really understand IEEE until I realized that they're more of an academic society than a professional society, despite what their marketing suggests. The academia mill is a weird way to fund training engineers for industry, and IEEE is just a forum for it.