[lug] Time sync w/GPS or radio

[George Sexton]

I've been wanting a time receiver for a long time. In a previous life, I 
was a calibration technician so I've been fascinated with time and 
frequency standards for a long time. What's been killing me has been the 
price. It's tough for me to explain to my wife that I want to buy a 
$1500 GPS time receiver because I think it would be cool. It's neat to 
see the Beaglesoft one is much cheaper.

I looked at the Radio Sync thing from the Beaglesoft folks, and it's 
nice at $220, but it's not directly supported by NTP. Someone would have 
to write a driver for it.

I saw their GPS receiver is a Garmin GPS-16. For kicks, I went to 
Garmin's site and found the unit for $105.

https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=158&pID=13194

It looks like you would need to follow these instructions to create an 
RS-232 interface and power supply. There are also instructions on 
getting the PPS stuff working, which is essential for higher accuracy:

http://time.qnan.org/

I'm sure that even if you purchased the kit from Beaglesoft, you would 
have to do the kernel PPS steps on the URL.

This would be a really cool project. I'm halfway handy with a soldering 
iron and I'm sure it wouldn't take much more than an hour to create the PCB.

Lori Reed wrote:
> IME, gps devices, at least hand held and pcmcia devices, have, at best, 
> problematical indoor reception. A bit of quick googling found this:
> 
> http://www.atomictimeclock.com/radsynhome.htm
> 
> I'm sure there are others.
> 
> Just curious, what is the url for the UK vendor you reference?
> 
> Lori
> 
> Gary Hodges wrote:
> 
>> I have some remote machines w/o internet access.  I get around that by 
>> dialing in a couple times a day, but I've never liked that solution. 
>> But what prompted me to start looking for a solution is...  You all 
>> will love this...  I have a machine on the net behind the firewall of 
>> a very large government organization where I'm not able to use a time 
>> server outside the network.  And, get this, they don't keep the time 
>> set on their internal time server.
>>
>> In case anyone is interested, I got a price quote from that UK vendor 
>> this morning.  $1590 for a GPS solution and $995 for a WWVB solution.
> _______________________________________________
> Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
> Mailing List: http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/mailman/listinfo/lug
> Join us on IRC: lug.boulder.co.us port=6667 channel=#colug
> 

-- 
George Sexton
MH Software, Inc.
Voice: +1 303 438 9585
URL:   http://www.mhsoftware.com/