Today was a pleasant surprise, the BG7TBL GPS Disciplined Oscillator, external reference arrived and much faster than I expected China Post to provide. There is no software or tech manual that comes with it so I didn't know what to expect. There are 3 LEDs an ALM, GPS Lock & Run. No idea what to expect with these & a web search did not lead me to a manual.
This one is listed with the 2015-09-17 date (Version) stamped on the front. Ebay # 331800738725 - It contained the GPSDO, antenna and 12V wall wart. The GPS is a U-blox NEO-6M-0-001 and the OXCO is a Oscilloquartz 8663-XS dual oven. Reading the stats on the stability, it's pretty amazing, search down for the 8663: http://tinyurl.com/h4j58ea There's some interesting and lengthy discussion about this series of GPSDO on the eevblog site. Interestingly, the OXCO in this version of the unit is different than listed on the master reference on the first page: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/bg7tbl-gpsdo-master-reference/ I did find the ALM LED remained on for 20 minutes or so and with a GPS lock (maybe one minute) the LED came on and remains on. The Run LED flashes around 3 times/second. Not sure what the flashing represents. I attached it to the K3EXREF and followed the directions to enable it in REF-CAL, in configuration. The effect wasn't immediately obvious but when I went to copy RTTY there was an apparent improvement to the copy in MMTTY and after transmitting, it seems like the recovery to copy is much faster than before. I'm looking forward to trying some of the digital modes and am happy this reference is engaged and the stability will be kept to the minimum needed. One thing I am wondering is how often the K3s utilizes the 10 KHz info being provided. I think I read every 4 seconds or so but I'm not sure I have that right. Nifty little piece of equipment to work with the K3/K3s Hope some find this info useful. 73, Gary KA1J ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to [email protected]
