The SMITHS QUASAR "Constellation"
https://i.imgur.com/ebvCZAo.jpg
The Quasar from The National 15 - The decline of British watchmaking and the role of Smiths*
I am putting this image here first... as the ad on the right always squashes the first post and I wanted you to first see the Quasar "Constellation" in its full glory (below in the next post).
https://i.imgur.com/Rff9jHg.jpg
Basically, before I saw these cases in the box here, the only Quasar by Smiths I was aware of, was the TV dialed rendering above from "The National 15 - The decline of British watchmaking and the role of Smiths in a hoped for discovery" by David Read.
*On page 15/88
https://ahsoc.contentfiles.net/media...-_Read_wm6.pdf
The SMITHS QUASAR "Constellation"
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Rev-O
BTW, I know very little about quartz watches.
I understand that 14 jewels is a lot for a quartz but have no idea about the 1.5MHz thing. Is that "high frequency"? I'm guessing it's probably prehistoric by todays standards, but maybe not?
I’d wondered about that. I’m way out of date on this stuff. But it stood out for me so I did a bit of Googling. Most modern quartz watches are 32kHz which I guess everyone knows. 262kHz is considered Ultra High Frequency for watches. Therefore 1.5MHz = 1500kHz must be extremely high frequency.
Multiple Megahertz quartz oscillators these days are more likely to be used in different applications like communications etc.
Another interesting angle is that a designer would cut a quite different shape quartz crystal for a low frequency application (eg 32kHz) vs high frequency (1MHz +). The physical vibration modes are different. There are also different basic circuit designs depending on how your crystal is cut and how you want it to perform.
I found this article which explains quite a bit of it if you can navigate the physics.
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a256373.pdf
I deduce from this it is quite likely that the Smiths engineers may have made a unique design of crystal and circuit, no doubt to the highest purist principles, while the rest of the world was gravitating towards the easy-to-mass produce ‘tuning fork’ shaped low frequency crystals and associated circuits.
That said I may have misinterpreted this; I am a bit rusty and some of the forum quartz experts may be able to clarify.