[In the system design review, Richard Hills suggests] substitute an estimate for the atmospheric residuals containing three terms: 1) the contribution from noise and short term instability in the radiometers; 2) a term proportional to the uncorrected path fluctuation, to allow for the uncertainties in the atmospheric conditions and modelling and the errors in the calibration of the radiometers; 3) a term to allow for atmospheric path fluctuations which are not measured by the radiometer at all (as discussed, the principle item here is the "dry" component due to temperature - or more precisely density - fluctuations). For the first term I suggest you take the specification, which is 10(1+wv/1mm)microns and equals 19.6microns (65.3fs) for the 5th percentile conditions you have adopted. This is a long established figure and I think it is best to stick with it, even though, as I shall describe below, it is quite conservative. (Remember that this is a limitation on sensitivity, i.e. it corresponds to an error that would be there even if there were no fluctuations at all in the water along the paths through the atmosphere. There is no reason to increase it because of uncertainties in the modelling, etc.; those go in the next term.) For the second term I again think that you should take the value of 2% that we have accepted as a specification. This is a good deal less conservative because, as indicated above, it is intended to include all the uncertainties in the conversion from changes in measured brightness temperatures to the changes in path due to water molecules. We think however that this is a reasonable figure for the "good" conditions that we are considering here and assuming that some effort gets put into optimizing the phase correction when we have some real experience on Chajnantor. This term is in any case not significant here: 2% of the 143fs of uncorrected phase fluctuation is only 2.9fs. Adding this in quadrature to the 65.3fs above gives just 65.4fs. It is difficult to give an estimate for the third term - the atmospheric path fluctuations due to things other than water. As we have discussed previously, these may get quite large when there is strong convection driven by the Sun heating the ground in the afternoons. Alison Stirling has started some work on this problem from the theoretical end, but it will be a while before we can draw any conclusions. What we are trying to establish here, however, is a value for the "best" conditions, which will certainly be much lower and for which the physical causes are much less clear. I suspect that the only way to get real numbers will be to fly balloons or kites on the ALMA site and measure the temperature fluctuations directly. We can get some guidance from optical seeing measurements, but the problem there is the extrapolation of these from the scale sizes of ~1m that they involved up to those relevant for ALMA, together with the vexed question of whether or not there is an "outer scale" on the density fluctuations. Better information should soon be available from the optical interferometers (especially the VLTI on Paranal, which has ~100m baselines and is at least in the same general area even though it is 2500m lower down). I will try to find out if they have any values yet. Meanwhile I suggest you take a value of 10microns (33fs), which I freely admit is no more than an educated guess, but again, I do not think we can take speculation that it may be worse than this even under good conditions as a reason for setting a softer spec on the electronic stability. This should again be added in quadrature (it will not be correlated with the radiometer noise) giving a total of 73.3fs. Applying your methodology then gives 37fs for the structure and 64fs for the electronics.