Lady Heather runs on a Mac (or Linux or FreeBSD or Windows) and can do the
deed. !m from the keyboard should switch the receiver mode.
The next version of Heather has a mode that will echo the the native receiver
data format out a second serial port in NMEA format.
>
Earlier today, GPS sat PRN 11 was offline for a few hours. PRN 12 will be
offline until tomorrow. I'm not sure if it is the cause, but my Ublox M8
locked up. My Venus timing receiver says it is tracking PRN 12. Most of my
other receivers sat PRN 12 is either unhealthy or visible but not
I got in a TL866A programmer with the complete adapter set, pulled the flash
chip from my dead TruePosition, and dumped the chip. Success first time!
Now to go through the ROM dump and see what hidden goodies there are.
A quick look seems to show commands for setting Kalman filter
I would look at using a 74HC series flip flop. Runs down to 2V.
Or perhaps the ECG or NTE 9093D (an ECG-9093D is $1.25 on Ebay). It's a dual
flip flop. You would need to check if the J and K inputs are usable in the
5065A. I think it only has one pin per J/K and the 931G has two AND'd
Converting GPS seconds to Gregorian date/time on the Arduino will be an arduous
task. You take GPS seconds and add it to the GPS starring epoch to get a
Julian date. Then add in the number of leap seconds as a fraction of a day to
get UTC and possibly add in a time zone offset for local time.
I got in one of the older style Trueposition GPSDOs from China. This is the
board shown in the "Packrat" documentation. It uses a Bliley OCXO instead of
the CTS one on the newer board.
Other than the connector differences, the only significant hardware difference
seems to be the temperature
I already tried that... the only difference seemed to be the temperature
sensor reading went up 20C. There was no significant change in the ADEV's or
holdovers. When a holdover starts, the 1PPS phase usually takes a 5 ns or so
hit.
Heather now has a option for removing "glicthes /
Ok, I dusted the TruePosition OCXO with some freeze spray. Not pretty
picture attached... it took around 6 minutes to stabilize. I used just enough
spray to lightly frost the can. It would probably help to shield the board
from drafts, but probably not wrap it in a polar parka.
It did
https://www.tindie.com/products/nsayer/skytraq-venus838lpx-t-timing-gps-module-breakout/
-
> Can't find this on Tindie???
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I ran a test of the TruePosition 1PPS signal performance using a TAPR TICC.
The TICC was clocked by a HP-5071A. The TICC was in time interval mode with
the Zyfer 1PPS on channel A and the 5071A 1PPS on channel B.
The TruePosition had been powered up for a couple of days. Values below tau
I ran a test of the Zyfer Nanosync-380 GPSDO 1PPS signal performance using a
TAPR TICC. The TICC was clocked by a HP-5370A. The TICC was in time interval
mode with the Zyfer 1PPS on channel A and the 5071A 1PPS on channel B.
These numbers are sort of a worst case. The Nanosync had been
The GPS with the lowest PPS jitter/sawtooth is the Venus timing receiver...
around 6 ns. Nick Sayer sells one on Tindie for $50. It is mounted on a
board that has the same pinouts as the Adafruit Ultimate GPS. Also Navspark
sells one for more $.
Lady Heather talks to the Venus
Some of the pins could be the Furuno GPS receiver data stream and not the GPSDO
data stream.
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I was looking at the 34401A service manual. It shows the VFD pinouts. Looks
like 18 pins topside and 16 pins bottom side and is a 14 seg display. I also
looked at the 53132A manual. The 53131/53132/53181 counters use a 14 seg
display with 18 pins top and bottom.
The 58503B is 14 seg with
The problem isn't a cathode or power supply problem. It is a phosphor problem.
Selecting a display mode that lights up characters that are not on the
default time display shows nice and bright characters there.
The display is a 12 character 14-segment display. There is a possibility that
I looked closely at the display and can see unused annunciators for frequency,
us, period, etc. So the display is the same as used in at least one of their
frequency counters. It has 12 alphanumeric digits.
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I recently got in an HP-58503B GPSDO from a local equipment liquidation
auction. I had to pay too much, but wanted one to verify Lady Heather's
support for the HP GPSDO's. It powered up at the equipment auction preview.
but not when I brought it home. After replacing the power supply with a
No, the TruePosition and Zyfer Nanosync (and TAPR TICC and HP-5071A) support is
in the next release. If you can compile the Linux or Windows code, I can send
you the latest source code.
Also, the LMU has been measured to run the board at 12V, not 15V. I know
that 23V will kill it...
I cleaned up the chip without removing any of the markings. It looks like it
is a Spansion S29JL032H90TFI21. Hopefully somebody has a reader that can
handle it.
Looking at the documentation for the LMU unit that these came out of didn't
reveal anything new. There is no mention of an antenna
One of my TruePosition GPSDOs fried a chip in the power supply when the wall
wart that was powering it failed and started putting out 23V. It apparently ran
for a while at that voltage before violently letting the magic smoke out.
If somebody can read a Spansion S29JL032H90TFI12? chip (some of
I'm using the Packrat info to work out how it works. The newer board firmware
seems to support everything the older one does.
Not sure if the older one has the $EXTSTATUS command that reports the
temperature. The newer board has a temperature sensor resolution of 0.032
degrees. Any real
It's getting a few more capabilities. I have worked out how to set the cable
delay value, set a position hold location, start/stop a self survey, and
(probably) save the settings in flash memory.
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I got in my Trueposition GPSDO's today and have one running. These units are
a little bit different than the Packrat documentation. There is no second
serial connector. The first three pins on the 6 pin connector are RS-232 at
9600,8,N,1 You need to jumper pins 4 and 5 to talk to the
I got in my Zyfer Nanosync 380 GPSDO off of Ebay and have it working with Lady
Heather. The documentation the Ed found is fairly decent. The 700+ lines of
code I added to Heather worked the first time (damn, I'm good ;-) )
It is a small (< 4x4x1") GPSDO that runs off of 12V (< 1A). It was
I also sent email to all the people in the Packrat slides. One email bounced
and I have not heard back from the other 2.
So far, I have had no luck finding any info on these devices.
--
> I've got an e-mail into the authors of the Packrat GPS Receiver Project
> slides
asking
Does anybody have any programming information for these devices (beyond what is
ion the packrat web site)? I have a couple of versions of it on order and would
like to add support to Lady Heather.
I have added support for the Zyfer Nanosync 380... mine should arrive in a
couple of days for
Recently some Zyfer Nanosync GPSDOs have shown up on Ebay and a couple of
people have asked about support in Lady Heather. Does anybody have a manual
that talks about the command set?
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I'd say screw the gasket / inset crud and go with flat stock or pcb material
(my Star-4 GPSDO came in a very similar housing and uses PCB endplates. It's
much easier and cheaper. I doubt that very many people will be installing
these outdoors, etc and need the fancy pants end plates and
OSHPARK has made several boards for me with cutouts. You put the cutout on
the milling layer and they recommend putting the word "CUTOUT" within the
cutout area. It's been a few years since I had any made that way... best to
ask them. Also inquire about the milling bit radius... you can't
One of the main reasons Lady Heather tracks the sun position, calculates solar
noon, etc was at the request of some people researching solar effects on the
GPS signal and multipath. You can enable logging of the satellite
constellation used each second and the sun position (it shows up at sat
If your frequencies of interest can be divided down to to the 1PPS range, the
TAPR TICC makes for an excellent frequency counter. The TADD-2 Mini divider
handles 1/2.5/5/10 Mhz or with a PIC chip swap 1/5/10/15 MHz. The TICC has
around 100 ps of jitter so you can get 1E-10 resolution at 1
If you can find an old Trimble SV6, those all rollover. They are rather
limited in the NMEA strings that they output. Most of the early Motorola 6
channel devices have also rolled over.
Or wait until 29 July 2017 and the Thunderbolt rolls over. The Tbolt does not
output NMEA, but Lady
Earlier somebody asked if these were M12's or M12T's.I powered mine up and
connected it to Lady Heather. It appears to be an M12T. It responds to the
survey and position hold commands and outputs the sawtooth correction value.
Also the hardware ID returned is P373T12T12.
That is the TAPR TICC small, low cost, open source, two channel time interval
counter. It offers around 60 ps resolution / 100 ps jitter for $200. It's a
rather nifty device...
https://www.tapr.org/kits_ticc.html
--
> Please forgive my ignorance but what is a TICC?
Particularly if the cable / wire was made in say the last 10 years. I've seen
a LOT of magnetic supposedly 100% pure (oxygen free, of course) copper wire
lately. Much of it branded by companies with a reputation to lose. It has
gotten so bad, I now check the resistance of all the wire I
Although I didn't have a way to log the temperature, I did have a couple of
thermocouples on the coil of coax. The coil was rather tightly wound... maybe
7" OD, 3"ID, and 3" tall. One thermocouple was on the outside and one buried
in the center of the coil. They stayed within a couple of
Yes, for a variety of reasons, I would not expect the best results with coax on
a spool. The coax that I tested was a loose coil of coax pre-fabbed with BNC
connectors. It should not have any significant stresses on it than a laid out
100 foot run would. The main purpose of the experiment
Unfortunately I did not have the ability to log temperature at the time I did
that test. I just added support to Lady Heather for an environmental sensor
so I should be able to do that later on. Currently my environmental sensor
code only does two channels of temperature. I am going to
I finally got around to using a TICC to measure the temperature coefficient of
100 feet of generic RG-58 coax using a TICC. The TICC was clocked by a HP
5071A 10 MHz output. The 1PPS output was connected to the input of the coax
and the TICC chB input. The TICC chA input was connected to
My UCT-2008 rubidium reference uses the same splitter. It is driven by a LPRO
rubidium through an amplifier circuit which also drives a divider chain for
producing several TTL level frequencies. One issue to be aware of with
splitters can be poor reverse isolation of the outputs. I have not
Apparently fluorescent tubes continuously emit a lot of other microwave
signals. I once built a homodyne doppler "speed" radar kit (used a coffee can
for the antenna). The way you calibrated it was to point it at a florescent
tube and and adjust the reading to a specific value.
I read it took less than a week to discover how to unravel the GLONASS military
signals after they were turned on...
--
> This approach is known as “security through obscurity”, and is deprecated
> in the professional of information security. What one invents, another can
>
My 30 year old Mercedes has an analog clock in it. I've always been amazed how
well it keeps time. A couple of years ago, I set it for daylight savings time
in the spring and did not reset it in the winter. Next spring it was still
accurate to within the resolution of reading the hands. I
Lady Heather can work with the Jupiter receivers in either NMEA or Zodiac
(binary) mode. Heather checks time stamps for consistency and flags any that
are out of sequence. I usually run it in binary mode. It's been a while since
I ran mine, but I don't remember ever seeing any skips. The
I have dozens of thingies with 4000 series CMOS in them. Yes, chips can fail
regardless of the logic family type. I have not noticed anything particularly
bad about 4000 series. In fact, I have seldom needed to replace any.
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You can get 10 CD4011's shipped f rom China for $1 off of Ebay...
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;
Sent: Monday, April 3, 2017 3:05 AM
To: Mark Sims; Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] TAPR TICC boxed
For even more fun you could try to detect the PTFE phase change at around 20C
using a cable with PTFE dielectric.
A pulse source with somewhat more
The autotune cable delay nulling feature works by putting the TICC into debug
mode which outputs time stamps (and other info) of both channels. Since each
channel is being fed by the same signal, the stamps of each channel should be
the same. Heather calculates the average chA-chB difference
I implemented the channel offset compensation feature specifically to make
measuring cable delays more accurate. I wanted to measure my TDR calibration
cable and another very precision delay line. I used Heather to null out the
channel/connector delays and then replaced one of the "T" cables
The new TICC support in Lady Heather has an "autotune" function that can null
out the cable and channel delays. You connect a signal (like 1PPS) to both
channels through matched cables (like via a T adapter) and it averages the
difference and sets the "FUDGE" factor for one of the channels to
I thought about using the clamp diodes as protection but was a bit worried
about power supply noise leaking through the diodes and adding some jitter to
the input signals... I'm probably just being paranoid. The TICC doesn't have
the resolution for it to matter or justify a HP5370 or better
(this might be a duplicate post... the last time I sent this, the message
bounced)
What did you do for input protection?
I want to build an input system for the TICC that incorporates some input
protection, switchable terminator, possibly settable threshold and edge
selects, and a
What did you do for input protection?
I want to build an input system for the TICC that incorporates some input
protection, switchable terminator, possibly settable threshold and edge
selects, and a switchable PICDIV divider like the TADD-2 Mini. That would
allow inputs of <1 .. 100 (or
I did a lot of work in Lady Heather to add timing message arrival time analysis
capability. Heather has a "set the system clock to receiver time" function
that is intended to be used on systems without access to something like NTP.
By knowing the arrival time of the last byte of the timing
The "DAC" was PWM based, but used a separate voltage regulator for the
"reference". I never tried it using the USB power as the reference.
The OCXO (+board) uses less than 500 mA warming up (which it does rather
quickly). It's in a small hermetic package about twice the size of a standard
I did it for $25... $7 for the GPS+antenna module, $3 for an Arduino chip on
a PCB with proto area from China (should have bought a lot more when they were
available),$10 for a small ovenized 5V TTL output OCXO (also should have
bought a lot more), and $5 for misc parts (OK, beer money
That doesn't make much sense if you are using the PICDIV properly... the TAPR
dividers use the PICDIV chip to do the dividing. The only difference between
using a TAPR divider and a bare PICDIV is that the TAPR dividers have an input
squarer circuit and output buffer. If you are feeding the
Yes, programs like Timelab and Stable32 are definitely the way to go for
post-processing and analyzing your data in depth. Lady Heather is more of a
real-time monitoring and data acquisition program.
The sensitivity of ADEV to data hiccups can be a good thing. If your ADEV data
goes to
Orin sent me his data files and I ran them through Lady Heather. Attached is a
screen dump showing the Time Interval Error (TIE) plot of the 1PPS signal.
This is the deviation of the 1PPS signal from the expected 1 second interval.
Three of the bad points are flagged (1, 2, and 3 at the
Here's some marketing eyewash for the thing... it has a 100 MHz output...
http://www.heritek.com.cn/Private/Files/3037bb9d8c45dac855ad.pdf
Darn it... I just bought a 5071A.
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If you can build the code (probably just Linux users), I can send you the
latest source code to try. Probably a couple of months before the public
release.
I am currently adding support for the TAPR TICC (or other time interval
counters) and also the HP5071A cesium beam oscillator. The
At 33 seconds past the minute Heather requests the SYST:STATUS? info from SCPI
receivers which takes 3 seconds for the device to send. The clock does not
update while Heather is reading the status info because the receiver is not
sending any time messages.
The next release "fakes" the
Plus Trimble's usage is rather misleading... you can do true overdetermined
clock in either a static or moving environment... it properly requires more
sats to be tracked than necessary to determine the time. Position hold mode
(and Trimble's overdetermined clock mode) requires a fixed
Does it have a saved/surveyed position? With a saved position you can
reasonable time performance with 1 sat. Without a saved position all bets are
off, there is no way for the receiver to determine the receiver/satellite
clock difference.
Trimble reports that the device is in
Heather has an automatic GPS week rollover detection feature. If it sees 10
consecutive time messages with a year before 2016, it assumes that the receiver
has week rollover issues and adds 1024 weeks to the time until the year is past
2015. This is indicated by the "ro" flag on the date
Yes, if your TICC reference oscillator is of lowish quality you should run the
TICC in time interval mode and it can analyze one device.
To analyze/compare two devices with one TICC you really need a very high
quality reference oscillator...
I have a couple of FTS oscillators that have
I just added the capability of Heather to monitor and control a GPS device
while simultaneously calculating ADEVs from an external time interval counter
like the TAPR TICC (it can also work with the time interval analyzer only).
This mode lets Heather calculate true adevs instead of
Lady Heather has detected a GPS week rollover event... 10 seconds of
consecutive years less than 2016. When this happens Heather adds 1024 weeks to
the receiver date until it is past 2016. This can happen when Heather is
connected to a receiver that is starting up and sending invalid dates
Yes, it should. Heather can input from a serial/USB connection or TCP/IP.
Your GPIB interface needs to stream data in a "talk-only" mode.
Currently my TIC reader can handle either time interval (period) data or time
stamps. It knows about TICC data with channel identifiers on the values
There are apparently companies out there that specialize in low volume
semi-custom enclosures. They are a lot like the cheap PCB manufacturers that
we are now blessed with in their economies of scale. I think the guy
mentioned the price for this power supply enclosure was around $35 (BTW,
A nasty bug crawled into my ear last night and muttered something like:
"Put the TICC counter circuit, a 1/5/10/15 Mhz PICDIV divider, input squarer,
terminator relay, etc on a module.Make a motherboard that 4-8 of those
modules can plug into along with an ATMEGA processor. Output the data
I doubt that it is something TAPR would do. Building complete systems gets
into all sorts of issues (mainly regulatory). But it is easy enough to build.
They sell a nice case that the RPI3 and touchscreen mounts in. The
PI+touchscreen+case sells for around $110. The TICC(s) connect to
At one time Timelab worked well for me under Wine. It's been years since I
tried it.
I recently got in a TAPR TICC and am in the process of adding time interval
counter support to Lady Heather. It's not even remotely as nifty as Timelab
(and never will be), but it does run under Windows /
Yes, that is the board in the unit. It is boxed up by BG7TBL and sold on
Ebay. It uses the highest spec ATDC version of the Star-4 with the highest
spec 8663 DOCXO.
Here's an hour of Thunderbolt data... with labels for the xDEVs. On narrow
screens only the 1-10-100-1000... divisions are labeled and not 1-2-5-10-20...
Otherwise the longer labels run together.
I also enabled the PPS plot which is basically the PPS jitter.
The Star-4 PPS seems to be
Beware of Atom based devices... Many of the Atom chips have a problem where a
couple of the critical clock output signals have a design problem and they
start failing after around 18 months. This problem just became public in the
last month or so when Cisco warned of impending failures in a
I don't have an M8T, only an M8.
Heather defaults to showing up to 14 satellites. You can specify more sats or
a dual column display using the SI or GCT commands or you can click the mouse
on the satellite info table.
You can also use the SG command to set the GNSS configuration, but version
The Ublox multi-GNSS receivers are incredibly picky about the channel
allocations. Basically if you don't use the default channel min/max values
they either won't work or are very flakey. I tried values other than
min=4/max=8 for Galileo and nothing worked. Also, if you have SBAS enabled
I built a switched capacitor balancer. It takes some time to balance a wildly
out-of-balance pack but does a great job of maintaining balance during charging
and discharge. I run the balancer during pack charging and discharging. I
tried it charging an 8S LiFePO4 pack with 7 fully charged
They can be if you store them in something like an ammo box. If they "go off"
in the sealed box the pressure builds, the reaction rate increases
exponentially, and voila... shrapnel time. There's a video out there showing
the results.
Most people recommend storing them in nomex/kevlar
I have a LOT of experience in testing and using 18650 cells. It is a horrible
place for the un-initiated to be. The market is so saturated with dangerous
fakes and inferior, over-speced cells that finding a genuine cell is a
vanishingly small probability. Hopefully the seller mentioned
I'd say 80% of the outside design work I do have little ditties in the
contracts that say NO development to be done on net connected systems. New
Eagle requires a net connection to keep working. Also the EULA seems to say
they can slurp your designs at will and ship them off to who knows
The TSIP protocol is the same one we all know and love. But some of the values
in the commands are different, particularly the set_io_options command that
sets which commands that the receiver sends automatically and in what format it
sends them. I suspect that, alone, would make dropping in
The protocol gets saved in a serial EEPROM. The firmware is apparently in
masked rom and cannot be upgraded. Trimble has some ancient utilities that let
you change the protocol between GPS (only does GGA and VTG sentences unless you
paid for custom firmware), TAIP (which Lady Heather now
On the chip with the "MX" marking on it, what f/w version does it show
(usually v5.02 or v5.10)? I have a couple of CM3's configured for TAIP output,
but I have the programs for switching them to TSIP or NMEA.
---
> The module is basically a Trimble SveeSix-CM3 and is
I recently added code to Lady Heather to support up to 10 external com links
(serial or TCPI/IP). One is the receiver port, one will be a TICC, and two
are "echo" ports. One echo port echoes all the raw data sent by the receiver
and the other does the same thing except the data is formatted
I recently made a change in Lady Heather's satellite signal maps to help with a
very similar issue. Before, the maps were based upon the accumulated average
value of the sat signals at each point in the sky. Now, every 24 hours, the
signal level averages are reset to their current average and
The Adafruit receiver outputs NMEA format data. The lat/lon values are sent as
dddmm.mm format (ddd=degrees, mm.mm=minutes) This restricts the resolution of
the values. Some receivers and newer NMEA specs support more digits past the
decimal point. Receivers that support native binary
> How do you display the survey plot in LH? i.e. the keyboard commands
If your receiver is running in a non-position hold mode then GI will show the
"fix map"... in position hold modes the fix map is just a single dot at the
center.Or you can zoom it to full screen with the ZL command.
If you have two clocks off by 18 seconds, one of them is running on GPS time
and one is running on UTC.
Check the upper left hand corner of the screen to see if it says "UTC time OK"
or "GPS time OK". If it says GPS, then the receiver is set to send GPS time.
A lot of Trimble devices
The Nortel devices can talk either as a Thunderbolt or as a SCPI device. Use
it as a Thunderbolt (/rxt). In SCPI mode the satellite positions are polled
for once a minute (at xx:xx:33). Thunderbolt mode provides much more and
better control of the receiver.
---
> I just got
I did a LOT of testing environmental sensors when I built my ultrasonic
anemometer weather station that is part of a rocket launch control system. The
best humidity sensor I found was the DHT21/SHT11/AM2301/SHT15. They run around
$3 and can also provide temperature to 0.1C res / 0.5C
I once saw a mention that the only difference between a 5372 and 5373 was the
firmware. A guy sent me some 5373A rom dumps and I tried them in a 5372... no
joy. It could be the PALs on the CPU board are different... or the rumor was
incorrect.
___
Lady Heather's on-screen clocks "tick" when the GPS time code message comes in.
Most receivers send the time code message around 100-250 msecs after the
actual 1PPS time. A few (like the Z3801A) send it before the 1PPS time. The
Jupiter-T sends it around 1200 msecs after the 1PPS!
Heather
Your Res-T is running on GPS time which has no leap-seconds.
My bet is the temperature drop was due to your environment and not leap second
processing. But those first-gen Res-T's are a bit quirky...
--
>I was running my resolution T at the leap second but LH 5.0 did not capture
I ran Heather on 9 different receivers. Only three did the leap-second "right"
with a time of 23:59:60 (which unfortunately shows up on the screen as
00:00:60)... long story... sorry...
The Trimble Thunderbolt, Venus 8 timing receiver, and the Z3811A (which the
automatic screen capture got
My Z3801A just started sending an invalid date in the "T2" format time code
message (which is its default format). It says the date is 2017/01/00 and Lady
Heather rejects the data and the clock stops updating.
My receiver went into rollover last August and I manually set the date which
cured
I forgot to mention... I still have some 3-board extender card kits for the
5370's. Two boards are used to extend one of the main cards. The other fits
the front panel board (and one of the other minor boards in the machine).
Contact me off list if needed...
I don't have a knob, but something that fits should be easy to find.
One warning... some of the pots have plastic shafts that can be brittle. They
can shear off either due to accident, turning too hard against the stops, or
just old age. I seem to remember that one of them has a switch on
If you started Heather and it shows a holdover time in GREEN, that means that
the receiver's last holdover event was 51 seconds long. A holdover time in
YELLOW, means that a 51 second holdover occurred while while Heather was
running. A RED value means the receiver is currently in
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