Appeal No. 2002-2169 Page 12
Application No. 09/163,286
Here, the appellants fail to meet the second requirement. They expressly group
claims 4-7 together, stating that "claims 4-7 are drawn to a method of automatically
calibrating an electronic distance meter." (Appeal Br. at 3.) Rather than arguing the
patentability of claims 4-7 separately from claim 1, moreover, the appellants allege,
"[t]he cited references fail to teach or suggest the combination of elements and steps of
the pending claims." (Reply Br. at 5.) Therefore, claims 4-7 stand or fall with
representative claim 1.
With this representation in mind, we address the obviousness of the claims in the
following order:
• claims 1 and 4-7
• claim 2
• claim 3.
Claims 1 and 4-7
We address the two points of contention between the examiner and the
appellants. First, the examiner makes the following assertion.
It would have been obvious to one having ordinary skill in the art at the
time the invention was made to modify Liessner et al by providing the
required calibration of the reference oscillator by using the teachings of
Osterdock et al who suggest the use of a GPS receiver to disseminate
frequency and time standards of unprecedented accuracies, and which
are locked to the satellites' atomic standards, thereby providing very
accurate and traceable frequency and time very inexpensively.
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