USSR National Time Unit Keeping Over Long Interval Using an Ensemble of H-Masers

摘要

Because of lack of official information on the USSR State Time and Frequency Service (STFS) for a long time we shall illuminate it in the first part of this report. The second part of the report will deal with a problem mentioned in a head line. The STFS is responsible for time and frequency measurement unification both in the field of atomic, TA(SU) and UTC(SU) and universal time UTI(SU) over the whole territory of the USSR. The scientific head of STFS is the Main Metrological Center, it is situated in Mendeleevo near Moscow. The National Primary Time and Frequency Standard (NPTFS) of the USSR is the instrumentational basis for independent realization of the national unit of time internal - second - in a full agreement with its definition in the SI system and also for the national time scale generation. Then the unit of time interval and time scale information are disseminated to secondary standards (SS), Fig. 1, each of them can keep autonomously the time unit and time scale. The most widespread links for time comparisons between SS themselves and between SS and NPTFS are as follows: micrometeorite (MM) link, portable clock, usually on the basis of HP Cs standard, and beginning from 1988 - on the basis of a small sized H-maser, Fig. 2, and beginning from the second part of 1989 signals of GLONASS system in a 'common view' mode. For short range time comparison TV signals are usually used. The independent realization of the time interval unit is performed by means of three laboratory Cs primary standards, Figures 3 through 5. One can find the detailed information on these instrument in References 1 through 3.