A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis of Frequency Transfer Uncertainty, Including Frequency Transfer into TAI

Published

July 21, 2010

Author(s)

Thomas E. Parker, Gianna Panfilo

Abstract

In this work we present a study of the determination of frequency transfer uncertainty in time series measurements. The first part of this paper is dedicated to the theoretical study of the frequency uncertainty in relation to the Allan deviation by applying the law of the propagation of uncertainty and a spectral analysis approach. In the next part the theoretical results are compared with simulated results and we use real clock and time transfer data to verify the analytical results. In the third section an experimental analysis of frequency transfer uncertainty is carried out. In situations where at least two transfer techniques are available a first difference statistic is used to determine the type and level of the transfer noise for transfer methods such as common-view GPS, carrier-phase GPS, and two-way time transfer. Frequency transfer uncertainties approaching 1×10^-16 at 30 days are possible. Finally, a method is examined for estimating the frequency transfer uncertainty in situations where only one transfer technique is available, such as frequency transfer into TAI. A comparison between analytical and experimental results is presented in Section 2.5.

Citation

Metrologia

Volume

47

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

frequency transfer, uncertainty, atomic frequency standards, TAI

Citation

Parker, T. and Panfilo, G. (2010), A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis of Frequency Transfer Uncertainty, Including Frequency Transfer into TAI, Metrologia, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=902318 (Accessed October 11, 2025)