An Analysis of NTSC's Timekeeping Hydrogen Masers

In this article, the hydrogen masers in the NTSC (National Time Service Center) timekeeping laboratory are tested. In order to avoid the impact of larger noise of caesium atomic clocks, TA(k) or UTC(k) is not used as reference, instead, the four hydrogen masers are mutually referred and tested. The frequency stability of hydrogen masers is analyzed using the four-cornered hat method, and the Allan standard deviations of each single hydrogen maser in different sample times are estimated. Then, according to the characteristics of hydrogen masers, by removing the trend term, excluding outliers, and smoothing the data with a mathematical method to separate the Gaussian noises of hydrogen masers, and finally by through the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, the Gaussian noise of each hydrogen maser is estimated.