>
Supposedly you can heat the glass to turn all the rubidium into gas again, giving you theoretically infinite lifetime.Thanks for the tip, that's interesting. I never know that they can be renewed in this way.
> Cesium oscillators on the other hand do deplete their cesium (by design), as mentioned by CuriousMarc in the video. The tube in his unit was probably replaced at least twice, at a cost of >80k.
Sad story. Recently I was browsing a web store that sells decommissioned U.S. military equipment. I was here to search for some cheap RF power meters, and I was surprised to see a HP 5071 in the listing. The vendor noted that he knew nothing about the equipment and information was welcomed. For a moment, I was thinking about sending him a service manual from the HP archive, before I realized it was simply impossible to get it up and running again without replacing the tube :(
> The 5071 successor by HP-Agilent-Symmetricom-Microsemi
Aha, the old Hewlett-Packard was truly a unique company. Its electronic technology has at least three separate chains of succession.
Test Equipment: HP-Agilent-Keysight
Semiconductor: HP-Agilent-Avago-Broadcom (Broadcom ended production of most HP parts, so now it's mostly dead, RIP...)
Frequency Standard: HP-Agilent-Symmetricom-Microsemi