Wavetek 395 Timebase Upgrade - With a Twist

[crocellian]

Bold and brave. 30 Years ago in the Home Brew club I knew a few guys like that.

[kuro]

Nice work! Some stand offs would stop the case acting as a heatsink for the OCXO. Maybe just some thick foam like that stuff for mounting pictures.

[TheDefpom]

Nice video, I think in that situation I would of installed a good tcxo in the same package style. If using an ocxo I wouldn't want to risk burning out traces from the much greater current draw, I would of connected directly to the power supply connector.

[PapasDino]

Nice mod Kerry. Couple of things I wondered about...unless you're going to leave the unit on continuously doesn't upgrading the oscillator to a OCXO defeat the purpose since you'll have to wait 15 minutes for it to settle down if your work requires better accuracy? Does the AWG have a reference input you could feed from your lab standard? And finally is it possible that the added current thru the IC chain ground route could exceed the current carrying capability of the trace? Wonder if there's a better PCB ground connection. BTW, my first thought when it didn't work was that the four layer ground pin connection may have been damaged as you were extracting the Fox. All this is really minor stuff though...thanks for sharing!

[MartenElectric]

Nice mod Kerry, I'm yet to shove OCXO to my Pendulum CNT90 counter, it also comes with standard XO which is absolutely dreadful, drifting +/- 30 Hz @10MHz

[swharden]

Are you worried about the OCXO getting warm and causing the tape to let go? If that oscillator falls down 90 degrees, that could cause a huge problem! What do you think about morning it elsewhere (without tape) and using coax to carry the output signal?

[CliveChamberlain]

What if the output of that nice TCXO gets too low of a termination when wavetek softare wants it turned off? Maybe consider that 7404 output as gate drive for a high-side mosfet switch. Better yet, leave it on and switch control the output with 7404.