Progress in Development of Test Oscillators for Crystal Units

Early crystal unit test oscillators as conceived some 20 years ago were principally duplicates of the actual equipment in which the crystal units were to be utilized, a practice which resulted in a large variety of test circuits and procedures for testing. It is now recognized that a knowledge of the equivalent electrical elements making up the crystal unit is essential to the circuit engineer, and that the older conception of frequency and activity, the latter being an attempt to express the quality of a crystal unit in terms of a particular oscillator circuit, do not define adequately its characteristics. The equivalent electrical circuit of the crystal unit contains essentially a resistance, an inductance, and 2 capacitances, which together with frequency define the performance of the unit. Crystal units are available in the frequency range from about 1,000 cycles to over 100 Mc. Their resistance range may vary from less than 10 ohms to over 150,000 ohms, the inductance from a few millihenries to nearly 100,000 henries and the capacitances from about 0.001 μμf to 50 μμf. Modern test oscillators, with frequency and capacitance measuring apparatus as auxiliary equipment, will measure these quantities with accuracies sufficient to meet present needs. The transmission measuring circuit also is described and is proposed as the standard reference circuit for comparison with the test oscillators.