Frequency steering and the control of UTC(K)

Abstract

The atomic clock are the key device in the time keeping system, however, the output frequency of an atomic clock always is different to the International Atomic Time(TAI), and among the atomic clock group the master clock directly affects the performance of the UTC(K), so it is necessary to steer the frequency of the master clock to the TAI In general, the output frequency of the master clock is steered by a micro-phase stepper. In this paper, the method and theory of how to calculate the steering data is discussed with the clock rate and local Atomic Time(TA), and then an experiment of frequency steering of UTC(K) is done. The conclusions of the experiment show that the method and the theory are correct and the frequency steering software can be used in the control of UTC(K).