Austin, You are getting plenty of good advice from the world's top time nuts already, so keep at it and as long as you're still interested, this topic is a never-ending rabbit hole. And now more than ever the time & frequency community needs new engineers. But I will chip in from a slightly different angle... Getting to grips with the fundamental concepts, tools and methods and experimenting to see things for yourself is a must, but while you are doing that, I welcome you to also spend a moment looking at how time & frequency are disseminated past the atomic clock, using what methods, and what the practical uses are - and you will learn how crucial time synchronisation and the underlying frequency are for today's connected world. Mobile communications and power networks are dead, and I mean dead, without precise time and frequency, not to mention navigation of all modes, finance, search & rescue, aviation, manufacturing, autonomous vehicles and finally media & broadcast and large scale computing. Synchronisation is this aether behind a significant part of what allows us to live our comfortable lives backed by technology. No doubt the Microchip folks have given you this spiel in some form, but this really is important stuff. So, have a look at network time synchronisation, and how packet networks / routing / switching affect it, have a look at protocols like NTP, PTP with its hardware integration and a plethora of profiles for different industries, Synchronous Ethernet and White Rabbit - you could even eventually turn your career towards that angle. Also get familiar with how a given state's NMI (National Metrology Institute - that would be NIST in the US) maintains the local realisations of- and contributes to- global time scales like UTC and TAI, how those timescales came to be and how they end up transferred to their intended use cases and how that relates to the source (traceability). Oh, and leap seconds exist. Microchip in particular, now that it's all under Microchip, has all these areas covered in their product lines. When you end up working on a T&F product, it is vital that you can also speak your customer's and end user's language. Your customers could be physicists, but they could also be network engineers. As to projects, when you have your Rubidium synchronised to GNSS/GPS and you have that nice, sharp 1PPS coming out of it, see how you can synchronise a PC or SBC to that pulse, have it serve time to another one over a network with and without hardware assistance and see if you can measure what's coming out on the other end and how it fluctuates when you poke at it. Many thanks, Wojciech On Wed, 24 Sept 2025 at 18:31, Austin Dixon via time-nuts < time-nuts@lists.febo.com> wrote: > Hi, I could use some advice. I'm an Industrial Electronics student with > one year left to go. A local branch of Microchip that specializes in > manufacturing and troubleshooting Atomic Clocks recently gave a > presentation to my class, and it sparked an interest for me. I would love > to work there when I graduate next year, so I decided to start doing > Time/Frequency projects on the side to learn as much as I can, and > hopefully it will make me stand out as a job candidate. > > I already have all the basic electronics lab equipment (multimeters, > oscilloscopes, soldering equipment, ect.). I just purchased an Efratom > FRK-L Rubidium Frequency Standard off eBay. I'm also eyeing some old > Frequency Counters on eBay. And I bought a stack of the recommended books. > So..... > > > * > What other lab equipment do I need? > * > Any recommendations for a budget Frequency Counter? > * > Any good surplus stuff I should look out for? > * > Any ideas for good projects? > > Thanks! > > -Austin > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@lists.febo.com > To unsubscribe send an email to time-nuts-leave@lists.febo.com > -- - Wojciech Owczarek