Ok, here's my reply to the statements of Mr.Pettis and his alter ego MisterDiodes.
I'd like to point out, that the eevblog is an 'open' forum. Especially in this thread many capable engineers, physicists, technicians and DIYer have contributed many new ideas, schematics, layouts, publications, calculations, limit estimations, test measurements, everything for free, in a copy-able, and most importantly, verifiable manner. I very much appreciate all these great and profound contributions here, and in this sense also the offer of custom specific resistor sets for a reasonable price, from Mr. Pettis.
In the different physics communities, usually all theoretical and experimental publications are freely accessible, papers maybe at a cost, but the openness is a fundamental necessity of this science. Each new theory or experiment requires critical and open reviews, pros and cons, before these new findings are taken for granted. There's also a strict principle, what you can't measure, replicate, or explain properly, simply does not exist in reality. Example: The infamous Cold Fusion experiment of Fleischmann and Pons.
I'm having the mindset of both of these worlds, therefore I absolutely dislike any entry here, which makes a claim without any verifiable and open facts, as of one of the above mentioned items.
Hiding oneself behind references to NDA, unknown, mysterious and frightening companies and hidden documents, and especially omitting ANY quantitative or qualitative detail about the claim, are no arguments for truth or existence of such, either.
In fact, such an argumentation technique fatally reminds me of all these quacksalvers like Solar Roadways, Solus Graphene Heater, Fontus Self Filling Water Bottle, Batteroo / Batterizer, and Theranos as best example for claiming an at first glance evident idea, but then secretly hiding details about supposed machines and tests, and sooner or later being debunked due to missing basic principles.
Mr. Pettis ratings and wordings about serious and profound contributions here in this thread, like 'being puny', 'ignorance', 'unsupported statements', and alike, are a bad substitute for arguments.
Proposals like 'remove the external sources of noise', or 'preventing the RF disturbance' are simply unrealistic. That's possible maybe in an anechoic RF chamber, or in an application where the circuit is not accessible from outside, like in the 3458A.
But this is not the use case of any of the references like 731, 732, 7000, 4910, and of all the DIY LTZ 1000 based references.
All these are used in lower grade cal labs, but also in more or less noisy environments, like in the ordinary houses of the forum contributors, which are likely polluted by RF spikes originating from coffee machines, dish washer, cell phone, WLAN, lighting and PC SMPSUs, and from the 'dirty' mains network.
Therefore the DIY references have to be shielded, that's very obviously necessary. But instead of repeating again and again that common place, would anybody please give a detailed description and practical demonstration, how to 'properly' immunize the circuit further from the exterior noise.
The design by Datron / Andreas is already proven to efficiently mitigate this problem.
I also cannot recognize a 'brute force 100nF caps' method. Adrian, please explain in detail, what you mean by this.
It's a common technique in commercial electronics to use a lot of 'EMC capacitors' to mitigate EMC irradiation.
Especially in a DC application like the LTZ1000 circuit, such filters are beneficial, as long the circuits are stable.
The sparse hint from Mr. Pettis that EMC pulses are transformed into current spikes (of what magnitude, please?), which in turn shall damage the 'microscopic matrices', does not convince at all.
Maybe the doped silicon crystal is meant, but the binding energies are on the order of eV, whereas the energy involved in irradiated emission is very probably many magnitudes lower than that, so any deterioration by this suggested mechanism is extremely unlikely, or the magnitude of measurable impact is extremely low.
Also, here we are talking about over 30 years old big, bipolar chip structures, being much less sensitive to supposed 'excessive' electric fields or currents, compared to modern small scale field effect structures.
Please, check all of your own LTZ 1000 applications critically concerning EMC irradiation, present your results here, and bring up some practical ideas and alternative product designs, how to solve that problem differently.
Frank