Re: [time-nuts] Star Box
Hi Bob Joe, The CMC Allstar was a high quality 12 channel L1 receiver. There was even an option for the DGPS version to have an onboard OCXO. Joe, does your have that or the ordinary Rakon TCXO? Shure the Allstar is not a high sensitivity receiver so do not try indoor navigation with this receiver. However, measurement quality with a decent antenna/antenna siting - it will still give the modern uBlox receivers a run. Not to bad for a 10-15 year old product. It is also nice - as Magnus pointed out - in that it driven by a 10MHz oscillator onboard. Compared to a uBlox based GPSDO it does not need the 1PPS/phase detector. These Allstars used for DGPS, were - I suspect - the prime reason for the CMC/Novatel branded AT575-90 L1 Choke ring antennas we have seen available. -- Björn Hi Pretty much everything made from silicon goes through 3-4 year cycles. Anything that's 10 years old is a couple of cycles behind. It's probably not going to work as well as an LEA-6T or even a LEA-5T. It might be competitive with a 4T or a 3T. Bob On Aug 15, 2013, at 10:47 PM, Joseph Gray jg...@zianet.com wrote: I just picked up a Star Box for $10. It has an Allstar DGPS board inside. I saw several mentions of similar boards in the archives and I have found some documentation on the net. Has anyone actually used one of these in a GPSDO? Does it work any better than the usual Motorola, Rockwell, or other available boards? The other thought is, since this is a DGPS board, how difficult would it be to use it to obtain a more accurate position fix? Or do I need other GPS boards to correlate this one with? I'll admit that so far, I have only skimmed the documentation that I downloaded. If I need to RTFM for my answers, just tell me so. Some data on what I have: Star Box Part No. 100-600304-100 (DGPS Base Station option is checked) Inside the box is a carrier board that has a power supply and an RS-232 TX/RX chip. The GPS board that plugs onto the carrier has a label on the underside that says VAR 100. This corresponds to the suffix of the part number on the box. The top side of the GPS board has the GPS receiver in a large metal box that is imbossed ALLSTAR 12 and CMC, which is the manufacturer (since then bought by Novatel?). Joe Gray W5JG ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Star Box
It has the normal Rakon TXCO. Joe Gray W5JG On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 12:45 AM, Björn b...@lysator.liu.se wrote: Hi Bob Joe, The CMC Allstar was a high quality 12 channel L1 receiver. There was even an option for the DGPS version to have an onboard OCXO. Joe, does your have that or the ordinary Rakon TCXO? Shure the Allstar is not a high sensitivity receiver so do not try indoor navigation with this receiver. However, measurement quality with a decent antenna/antenna siting - it will still give the modern uBlox receivers a run. Not to bad for a 10-15 year old product. It is also nice - as Magnus pointed out - in that it driven by a 10MHz oscillator onboard. Compared to a uBlox based GPSDO it does not need the 1PPS/phase detector. These Allstars used for DGPS, were - I suspect - the prime reason for the CMC/Novatel branded AT575-90 L1 Choke ring antennas we have seen available. -- Björn Hi Pretty much everything made from silicon goes through 3-4 year cycles. Anything that's 10 years old is a couple of cycles behind. It's probably not going to work as well as an LEA-6T or even a LEA-5T. It might be competitive with a 4T or a 3T. Bob On Aug 15, 2013, at 10:47 PM, Joseph Gray jg...@zianet.com wrote: I just picked up a Star Box for $10. It has an Allstar DGPS board inside. I saw several mentions of similar boards in the archives and I have found some documentation on the net. Has anyone actually used one of these in a GPSDO? Does it work any better than the usual Motorola, Rockwell, or other available boards? The other thought is, since this is a DGPS board, how difficult would it be to use it to obtain a more accurate position fix? Or do I need other GPS boards to correlate this one with? I'll admit that so far, I have only skimmed the documentation that I downloaded. If I need to RTFM for my answers, just tell me so. Some data on what I have: Star Box Part No. 100-600304-100 (DGPS Base Station option is checked) Inside the box is a carrier board that has a power supply and an RS-232 TX/RX chip. The GPS board that plugs onto the carrier has a label on the underside that says VAR 100. This corresponds to the suffix of the part number on the box. The top side of the GPS board has the GPS receiver in a large metal box that is imbossed ALLSTAR 12 and CMC, which is the manufacturer (since then bought by Novatel?). Joe Gray W5JG ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Star Box
Joe, On 08/18/2013 06:40 AM, Joseph Gray wrote: Magnus, Thanks for the comments. I did find the manual online. I will have to read through it when I get a chance. From the past comments in the archives, I was hoping to hear about anyone's experience using this in a GPSDO and whether it would be better than other brands. Well, feeding it with a 10 MHz is a trivial mod away, as it has a 10 MHz oscillator. Logging the time-error and frequency-error messages is trivial, so you have your phase and frequency detector done, so a PIC/AVR to do the control-loop and a DAC for steering and you have a nice little GPSDO with carrier phase measures. I have set it aside for now, as I have other projects that need to be finished before the end of the month. Early next month I'll be away for some training. I'd take some of my projects with me to work on in the evening, after training, but I'm afraid I'd get arrested by the TSA when they see electronic stuff :-) TSA has looked inside my bag, and concluded that what they saw on their x-ray was just the result of an unusual gathering of harmless stuff. Cheers, Magnus ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Star Box
Hi Pretty much everything made from silicon goes through 3-4 year cycles. Anything that's 10 years old is a couple of cycles behind. It's probably not going to work as well as an LEA-6T or even a LEA-5T. It might be competitive with a 4T or a 3T. Bob On Aug 15, 2013, at 10:47 PM, Joseph Gray jg...@zianet.com wrote: I just picked up a Star Box for $10. It has an Allstar DGPS board inside. I saw several mentions of similar boards in the archives and I have found some documentation on the net. Has anyone actually used one of these in a GPSDO? Does it work any better than the usual Motorola, Rockwell, or other available boards? The other thought is, since this is a DGPS board, how difficult would it be to use it to obtain a more accurate position fix? Or do I need other GPS boards to correlate this one with? I'll admit that so far, I have only skimmed the documentation that I downloaded. If I need to RTFM for my answers, just tell me so. Some data on what I have: Star Box Part No. 100-600304-100 (DGPS Base Station option is checked) Inside the box is a carrier board that has a power supply and an RS-232 TX/RX chip. The GPS board that plugs onto the carrier has a label on the underside that says VAR 100. This corresponds to the suffix of the part number on the box. The top side of the GPS board has the GPS receiver in a large metal box that is imbossed ALLSTAR 12 and CMC, which is the manufacturer (since then bought by Novatel?). Joe Gray W5JG ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Star Box
Hi Joe, On 08/16/2013 04:47 AM, Joseph Gray wrote: I just picked up a Star Box for $10. It has an Allstar DGPS board inside. I saw several mentions of similar boards in the archives and I have found some documentation on the net. Has anyone actually used one of these in a GPSDO? Does it work any better than the usual Motorola, Rockwell, or other available boards? The other thought is, since this is a DGPS board, how difficult would it be to use it to obtain a more accurate position fix? Or do I need other GPS boards to correlate this one with? I'll admit that so far, I have only skimmed the documentation that I downloaded. If I need to RTFM for my answers, just tell me so. Some data on what I have: Star Box Part No. 100-600304-100 (DGPS Base Station option is checked) Inside the box is a carrier board that has a power supply and an RS-232 TX/RX chip. The GPS board that plugs onto the carrier has a label on the underside that says VAR 100. This corresponds to the suffix of the part number on the box. The top side of the GPS board has the GPS receiver in a large metal box that is imbossed ALLSTAR 12 and CMC, which is the manufacturer (since then bought by Novatel?). Grab the manual, set it on self-survey and you have a nice little receiver. Since it does both code and carrier phase, you have added precision. Since it is a DGPS base station, it naturally have a built-in self-surveying using the power of that combined tracking. Hook it up to a good choke-ring, it deserves it. Multipath is what kills precision for this one. It will output DGPS corrections, such that any other DGPS receiving GPS you have can quickly acquire accurate lock, but you need to provide a link for the RTCM messages. Love to have one even if I have similar stuff. Cheers, Magnus ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Star Box
Magnus, Thanks for the comments. I did find the manual online. I will have to read through it when I get a chance. From the past comments in the archives, I was hoping to hear about anyone's experience using this in a GPSDO and whether it would be better than other brands. I have set it aside for now, as I have other projects that need to be finished before the end of the month. Early next month I'll be away for some training. I'd take some of my projects with me to work on in the evening, after training, but I'm afraid I'd get arrested by the TSA when they see electronic stuff :-) Joe Gray W5JG On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 5:00 AM, Magnus Danielson mag...@rubidium.dyndns.org wrote: Hi Joe, On 08/16/2013 04:47 AM, Joseph Gray wrote: I just picked up a Star Box for $10. It has an Allstar DGPS board inside. I saw several mentions of similar boards in the archives and I have found some documentation on the net. Has anyone actually used one of these in a GPSDO? Does it work any better than the usual Motorola, Rockwell, or other available boards? The other thought is, since this is a DGPS board, how difficult would it be to use it to obtain a more accurate position fix? Or do I need other GPS boards to correlate this one with? I'll admit that so far, I have only skimmed the documentation that I downloaded. If I need to RTFM for my answers, just tell me so. Some data on what I have: Star Box Part No. 100-600304-100 (DGPS Base Station option is checked) Inside the box is a carrier board that has a power supply and an RS-232 TX/RX chip. The GPS board that plugs onto the carrier has a label on the underside that says VAR 100. This corresponds to the suffix of the part number on the box. The top side of the GPS board has the GPS receiver in a large metal box that is imbossed ALLSTAR 12 and CMC, which is the manufacturer (since then bought by Novatel?). Grab the manual, set it on self-survey and you have a nice little receiver. Since it does both code and carrier phase, you have added precision. Since it is a DGPS base station, it naturally have a built-in self-surveying using the power of that combined tracking. Hook it up to a good choke-ring, it deserves it. Multipath is what kills precision for this one. It will output DGPS corrections, such that any other DGPS receiving GPS you have can quickly acquire accurate lock, but you need to provide a link for the RTCM messages. Love to have one even if I have similar stuff. Cheers, Magnus ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
[time-nuts] Star Box
I just picked up a Star Box for $10. It has an Allstar DGPS board inside. I saw several mentions of similar boards in the archives and I have found some documentation on the net. Has anyone actually used one of these in a GPSDO? Does it work any better than the usual Motorola, Rockwell, or other available boards? The other thought is, since this is a DGPS board, how difficult would it be to use it to obtain a more accurate position fix? Or do I need other GPS boards to correlate this one with? I'll admit that so far, I have only skimmed the documentation that I downloaded. If I need to RTFM for my answers, just tell me so. Some data on what I have: Star Box Part No. 100-600304-100 (DGPS Base Station option is checked) Inside the box is a carrier board that has a power supply and an RS-232 TX/RX chip. The GPS board that plugs onto the carrier has a label on the underside that says VAR 100. This corresponds to the suffix of the part number on the box. The top side of the GPS board has the GPS receiver in a large metal box that is imbossed ALLSTAR 12 and CMC, which is the manufacturer (since then bought by Novatel?). Joe Gray W5JG ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
