These are original Trimble Thunderbolt (aka TBolt) GPSDO left over from the 2008-2010 TAPR group buy. By late 2010 we got burned out shipping hundreds of them and so there are several large boxes left. I also kept a generous pile of them to handle returns but the defect rate turned out to be really low. The bottom line is there are at least 50 TBolt's left, maybe more.
I mentioned a final group buy on time-nuts a month ago and was flooded with requests. I'll try to make it first-email first-served, but as I get a better feel for how many I have that pass all the tests, I may have to prune the list, or limit it to one per person instead of two, or something like that. Let's deal with that bridge later.
These are OEM surplus USA versions — not the used, battered, salvaged versions you often see on eBay. Note these are not the "red" or "blue" Thunderbolt; they are an OEM special (E911?) with better performance than the standard commercial Trimble Thunderbolt.
They will all be tested for 100% functionality, DAC range, frequency accuracy, drift rate, and stability (ADEV).
Like the original TAPR buy, I'll offer a 100% refund or replacement warranty.
There was enough interest by international time-nuts that I will ship both domestic and international. Details on this later.
Please note this project is a non-profit, labor-of-love effort. I am just a guy at home with a serious clock hobby, who started a web site and mailing list over 20 years ago. You couldn't pay me enough to do this work, to deal with emails, testing, packing, labeling, and especially going to the post office. But I do it because it's a shared hobby we have.
The one reward I will get out of all this is raw data on a huge pile of GPSDO, which I will share with the group. In the history of time-nuts, no GPSDO has been as popular as the TBolt. No one has tested so many GPSDO before. I'm not sure what I'll find, but it will be interesting.
Final price is not firm yet but I expect it will be on the order of $180 for a fully tested TBolt with guarantee. And $90 for a partially working TBolt, as-is. By partially working I mean the oscillator is known good but the GPS receiver isn't working, or the GPS receiver is known good but the oscillator has issues.
These semi-broken TBolt's are actually in demand because it's a rewarding project to take a TBolt GPS receiver and replace the onboard Trimble/Vectron OCXO with an external 10 MHz oscillator, such as a hp 10811A, or even a telecom Rubidium oscillator. The TBolt has user-adjustable tuning parameters that makes this possible.
If you are in a huge rush, contact me with your story, or just get a random TBolt from eBay. If you can wait a month or two then this final batch of fully tested TBolt's is for you. I'll contact you when your TBolt is ready and we can figure out payment and shipping details.
Testing is finally starting this week (August 30, 2021). I am setting up a TBolt pipeline in my time lab to handle up to 16 at a time, each for a duration of 2 weeks. By feeding a few TBolts into the pipeline per day, by mid- to late-September I'll have several fully tested TBolts per day to ship. This will likely continue through October or when the pile is exhausted.
/tvb