Re: How important is 1 Hz?

Besides the math error in the 3rd to last paragraph (the MY output range would be 848915 to 849085), I think your very good question is based on an inaccurate premise, or a premise rife (!) with inaccuracy.

A frequency counter that can measure 1000 Hz +/- 0.1Hz accurately needs a measurement error band of +/- 0.001%. This is ten times the accuracy of the desired result, a common way to define how good a meter you need to measure something. Today such an instrument is inexpensive, certainly less than $1000 and maybe less than $200.

BUT in the 1930's when Rife was doing his main body of work, that kind of accuracy and precision was available only in places like The National Bureau of Standards, MIT, and other high-end research operations. A practical digital frequency counter was decades away in the future. I submit that all of Rife's frequencies are "near misses." I'm not saying his work has no value, or his numbers are useless, or anything like that. What I am saying is that quoting them to 4 or 5 or 6 digits of precision looks great on paper, but the equipment that produced the original numbers was not accurate enough to support that precision.

Today, a high-precision, adjustable oscillator that can produce 499,999 Hz, 500,000 Hz, and 500,001 Hz is a few hundred dollars, and the underlying circuit (without the fancy display, keypad, case, etc.) is around $100. That's 10,000 times less than it would have cost in the 30's. The problem isn't creating very changes in frequency from a single reference clock, it is the accuracy of that reference clock. Today it is relatively easy to pick up a GPS signal and use it as a reference for a frequency synthesizer, giving you atomic clock accuracy. But in the 30's - ? Nope.

So, is it necessary to reproduce a target frequency to within 0.01% (PZ's example) when the original target frequency was accurate to within only 1%?

ak
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