Re: [time-nuts] Arduino GPSDO with 1ns res TIC

2014-02-13 Thread Hal Murray
[Context is cheap VCXO] When used inside a GPSDO it only has to hold over for one second until the next correction. Only if you have a good antenna and/or antenna location. I have several low cost GPS units located in far-from-ideal locations. They work most of the time but often fade out

Re: [time-nuts] Maxim DS3232 and I2C

2014-02-15 Thread Hal Murray
michael.c...@sfr.fr said: So if you do a multi-byte read to get the lot at once, then it should be coherent. I saw some code to do this somewhere, but I have lost track of it. For things like that, I tend to write some test code to sanity check my understanding. Then I let it run overnight

Re: [time-nuts] Measuring 1 PPS with an HP 5335A

2014-02-16 Thread Hal Murray
The above trigger changes combined with reconfiguring for 50ohms input signal did the trick. I'm now seeing readings like 0.999 999 983 +0. That's a good way to measure/calibrate the crystal in your 5335A. :) (Assuming you have a good reference, and GPS is good if you get consistent

Re: [time-nuts] Valentines Day Love Numbers

2014-02-19 Thread Hal Murray
bro...@pacific.net said: I wonder if NIST has one of the GWR gravitymeters on a pier and uses that to discipline their fountain clocks for the elevation change of the pier or if that's done for the GPS reference antennas? Radio astronomers pay serious attention to earth tides. For VLBI, they

Re: [time-nuts] Looking for WWVB digital wall clock with digital 24 hour UTC display

2014-02-20 Thread Hal Murray
rich...@karlquist.com said: I want to use WWVB because I want to be able to mention to visitors that the clock links to an ensemble of 5071A cesium standards, and I was one of the designers of the 5071A, the actual atomic clock. ... Neat. What does the Air Force use as a reference for GPS?

Re: [time-nuts] OT - Portable Digital 'scope

2012-02-23 Thread Hal Murray
Actually, undersampling does use the alias effect to bring down the RF carrier. That is, the direct sampling radio concept cannot avoid the aliasing: it is exploited to avoid, for example, to sample a 2GHz carrier modulated with a 20MHz signal with a 4Gsample/second ADC (by the way, does it

Re: [time-nuts] Neutrinos not so fast? (defectove connector)

2012-02-25 Thread Hal Murray
mag...@rubidium.dyndns.org said: I use the rule of thumb that 1 ns is 3 dm in free air and 2 dm in coax and fibre My rule of thumb is that fiber or good coax (foam) slows down by the conversion from km to miles. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam.

Re: [time-nuts] OP-Amps for 10MHz distribution...?

2012-02-29 Thread Hal Murray
li...@rtty.us said: You *could* use transformers or filters to transform to higher impedance, but they add phase shift. Phase shift is a problem if it changes (over time, temperature, vibration, phase of the moon...). Change in phase = change in time = signal is degraded. Transformers are

Re: [time-nuts] Loran transmitters back on the air.

2012-03-01 Thread Hal Murray
What sort of accuracy can I expect from a Loran type system? I assume the answer is it depends, but I'm looking for the overview type answer. What does it depend upon? What are the ballpark type answers? What info should I be providing to get better answers? I assume it depends upon the

[time-nuts] FWD: More LightSpeed/Dish stuff from usenet:comp.dcom.telecom

2012-03-06 Thread Hal Murray
--- Forwarded Messages Subject: DoD accused of subverting LightSquared plan in 2010 [telecom] Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:38:39 -0500 On LightSquared, Defense Department official urged synch up with GPS lobby By ELIZA KRIGMAN | 3/2/12 9:33 AM EST A Department of Defense official urged his

Re: [time-nuts] FCC Chair Talks Spectrum, Gets GPS Letter

2012-03-07 Thread Hal Murray
mbla...@satx.rr.com said: I read a white paper Javad put out touting their new (and cheaper to build) front end filter. Of course it is patented. So guess where everyone has to go should LS get the green light. Was that filter included as part of the recent round of testing? Did it

Re: [time-nuts] Three HP oldies

2012-03-12 Thread Hal Murray
semif...@comcast.net said: Or if it is all text, the postscript file system is very good, it allows control of the entire page formatting in preservation of accurate alignments. Postscript also does lines and circles and ... Usually it gets (much) better results with text than you get from

Re: [time-nuts] WWVB BPSK Receiver Project? (fwd)

2012-03-16 Thread Hal Murray
p...@phk.freebsd.dk said: Hmm... do you mean you want to store all samples of an hour and then avarage over it? That would be the ideal way to do it, since it would make one heck of a comb filter and eliminate pretty much anything else. That only works if your reference clock is stable

[time-nuts] Neutrinos not faster than light

2012-03-16 Thread Hal Murray
Announcement from CERN: ICARUS experiment at Gran Sasso laboratory reports new measurement of neutrino time of flight consistent with the speed of light http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate

Re: [time-nuts] IOTECH 488 EPROM

2012-03-18 Thread Hal Murray
I've never seen a PLCC UV erasable package. Do they exist? Yes. We used them many years ago. They are much more expensive than the write-once plastic packages. For the chips we were using, it was more than 2x. If you were reasonably sure you wouldn't need to reprogram them, plastic

Re: [time-nuts] WWVB phase plots

2012-03-19 Thread Hal Murray
It is also the case the DCF77's phase modulation probably isn't as good as it could be if the goal is to find it in the noise since it only swings +/- 15 degrees rather than +/- 90. Its big advantage might be that it is high speed, with lots of transitions, so you can probably measure phase

Re: [time-nuts] IOTECH 488 EPROM

2012-03-19 Thread Hal Murray
jlt...@att.net said: I have a friend who is helping me with the effort. He has written some programs to work with a 3458A and the ProLogix USB/GPIB adapter. I plan to dissect the programs and modify them to suit my needs. Hopefully, it will be a learning experience. We should collect

Re: [time-nuts] Experience with THS788 from TI?

2012-03-23 Thread Hal Murray
mag...@rubidium.dyndns.org said: For high speed digital design this is a good starter: http://www.amazon.com/ High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/0133957241/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8qid=13324 91581sr=8-1 You forgot the sub-title: High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic I really

Re: [time-nuts] CW12-TIM

2012-03-23 Thread Hal Murray
act...@hotmail.com said: Thanks Ed, My Commsync has the LPN clean up oscillator option do you think that will clean up the sawtooth? I doubt it. What's the time constant on the PLL? Do you know about hanging bridges? -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam.

Re: [time-nuts] Best reason

2012-03-28 Thread Hal Murray
Why do we need really accurate clocks? Time or frequency? p...@phk.freebsd.dk said: Because accurate clocks is the central technology that makes GPS, mobile phones and the internet work. What part of the internet depends upon accurate clocks? Ethernet, for example, requires roughly similar

Re: [time-nuts] Pulsar Source?

2012-03-28 Thread Hal Murray
All that is of course correct. But ultimately the pulsars are a better source, I see it as an application question, could it be utilized? Perhaps building an algorithm and basing corrections on multiple pulsars x-ray pulses like a GPS constellation for the next generation of conventional GPS.

Re: [time-nuts] ntpdc -c kern explanation

2012-03-28 Thread Hal Murray
Can someone give me a lay mans explanation of each of the lines of output from my ntpdc -c kern command please? You will probably get better answers to NTP specific questions on the NTP mailing list: http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions It's gatewayed (both directions) to

Re: [time-nuts] Best reason

2012-03-28 Thread Hal Murray
jim77...@gmail.com said: So when a member of the general public says: Why do we need really accurate clocks? What is your answer? Personally I explain that accurate clocks enable you to pack a higher data rate into your smart phone. They like that. Any other thoughts? Navigation? It goes

Re: [time-nuts] CW12-TIM vs M12M and the world

2012-03-29 Thread Hal Murray
The sawtooth error on the Motorola M12+ is about +/- 25ns, while the CW12-TIM has a sawtooth error of +/- 2 ns, so correcting for the sawtooth error is not as critical with the CW12-TIM. The first claim The sawtooth error on the Motorola M12+ is about +/- 25ns is correct but are you

Re: [time-nuts] Pulsar Source?

2012-03-30 Thread Hal Murray
act...@hotmail.com said: Forth: The problems I foresee are can an practical algorithm accounting for the complex motion of all these bodies be built ... Radio astronomers are pretty good at that sort of calculation. Google for VLBI. The key step for VLBI is modeling the exact location of

Re: [time-nuts] HP Z3801A Sale

2012-03-31 Thread Hal Murray
There really is nothing much to this modification. The Z3801A is already designed to easily work on either interface, but most units are configured for RS-422 as the default. It takes perhaps a half-hour to remove a few zero-ohm SMD resistors and solder in a header strip. The simple

Re: [time-nuts] Opera coordinator has resigned

2012-03-31 Thread Hal Murray
j...@quikus.com said: It was happenstance that the OPERA connector was mated enough to work, but not enough to work properly. A while ago, I was thinking that half the problem was a design error. But then I couldn't figure out how to do it right. Maybe monitoring the pulse height would

Re: [time-nuts] 1 pps correction

2012-03-31 Thread Hal Murray
mar...@ptsyst.com said: I’ve seen that the peak to peak jitter is reduced from something like 27 ns to 10 ns. Is this a reduction of just the jitter, or is the actual accuracy to UTC also improved by this amount. Have you read the hanging-bridges paper? Tom Clark and Rick Hambly:

Re: [time-nuts] 60Hz More or Less

2012-04-02 Thread Hal Murray
robert8...@yahoo.co.uk said: Have a look in The Art of Electronics by Horrowitz Hill (if you don't hav a copy, you should! or try the local libary). It has a nice circuit for this (Actually a telescope drive IIRC) type of application. Rats. I can't find my copy. I think the trick is that

Re: [time-nuts] Antenna for t-bolt

2012-04-02 Thread Hal Murray
c...@omen.com said: Presumably a timing antenna would block low elevation signals to reduce multipath. Maybe, but there is a software aspect to the filter. You get to select the elevation angle. I don't remember seeing any specs about the filtering angles of various antennas. Has anybody

Re: [time-nuts] Antenna for t-bolt

2012-04-03 Thread Hal Murray
shali...@gmail.com said: I got it with a red box Thunderbolt I bought from a lit member a long time ago. It has some obvious signs of experience being outside. It is possible that moisture got inside. Maybe I should try to take it apart? Not sure how to open it without breaking the radome.

Re: [time-nuts] NTP jitter with Linux

2012-04-05 Thread Hal Murray
My guess on the original question is that keeping the CPU busy puts junk into the cache so the whole interrupt processing path takes every possible cache miss. NTP doesn't care how fast that code is as long as it's consistent. (Of course, you probably get a different answer, but we are

Re: [time-nuts] WWVB phase modulation test April 15-16

2012-04-12 Thread Hal Murray
Just the T and a DC block. 1/4 wave at 60 kHz is far, far longer than any cable you have. This is time-nuts. Somebody is likely to do something most of us would consider, well, nutty. It's probably reasonable to make a lumped-circuit approximation of a long transmission line at 60 KHz or

Re: [time-nuts] Re-radiating a GPS signal...??

2012-04-12 Thread Hal Murray
li...@medesign.ro said: GPS being extremely time-dependent, any delay introduced will affect positioning precision. I think you will just get the position of the receiving antenna for the repeater. It will get the time when the signals arrived at that antenna. Consider what happens if you

Re: [time-nuts] Re-radiating a GPS signal...??

2012-04-12 Thread Hal Murray
hmur...@megapathdsl.net said: I think you will just get the position of the receiving antenna for the repeater. It will get the time when the signals arrived at that antenna. Consider what happens if you replace the air between the repeater's transmit antenna and the GPS receiver with a

Re: [time-nuts] T-bolt steering an LPRO...?

2012-04-15 Thread Hal Murray
mp...@clanbaker.org said: Some time ago I queried the list for info on how to connect and steer an LPRO-101 Rb oscillator with a T-bolt. Now that I am ready to start on that project I can't find the responses I got from the list. All the list traffic is archived. Google indexes it so

Re: [time-nuts] Chinese Scopes (was: Re: LORAN-C at MIT)

2012-04-16 Thread Hal Murray
What's the quality of those chinese scopes? http://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/2012-January/061925.html -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe,

Re: [time-nuts] Chinese Scopes (was: Re: LORAN-C at MIT)

2012-04-16 Thread Hal Murray
j...@quikus.com said: Going through layer after layer of ever more obtuse menus is just not 'user friendly' to me. Maybe it is to the designers, because they are used to a 10,000+ character alphabet? How much of that is because you want to use fancy features that didn't even exist on older

Re: [time-nuts] Chinese Scopes (was: Re: LORAN-C at MIT)

2012-04-16 Thread Hal Murray
I would actually like to know why many seem to feel that a 500 MHz analog 'scope is not good enough for what you really do in your lab? Older 'scopes didn't NEED to re-allocate memory, or use peak modes to avoid sampling artifacts. I can think of 3 reasons why I like digital scopes:

Re: [time-nuts] Chinese Scopes

2012-04-16 Thread Hal Murray
To bring this full circle, a friend bought a very clean, working 465 for $50 at MIT. Did that include probes? :) Good probes are probably worth more than that even without the scope. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam.

Re: [time-nuts] Advice on Synergy M12+ adapter and SYMTRIK SYM-RFT-XX.

2012-04-19 Thread Hal Murray
and...@carrierdetect.com said: So, I have a Motorola M12+ GPS receiver in a Synergy Systems adapter board, and one of those little Symtrik MSF receiver boards. I'd like to try and get both working under Linux with ntpd (not at the same time!), and was hoping that someone might be able to

Re: [time-nuts] Thunderbolt Question

2012-04-23 Thread Hal Murray
wa6...@comcast.net said: I have been using a surplus Thunderbolt for about six months, and it seemed to be working fine. In January 2012, a message came up in yellow, (LEAP PENDING!), I don't know what this means, but since it didn't go away on Feb 28, must not be leap year related.

Re: [time-nuts] PICTIC II ready-made?

2012-04-26 Thread Hal Murray
albertson.ch...@gmail.com said: 2) The IDE is written in Java and is portable. It is truly identical on all platforms. Yes it uses gcc but the end user never has to deal with gcc or even know what gcc is. Same with saving your code, hit just puts it some place and keeps track of it Do I

[time-nuts] GPS, USGS Early Earthquake Warning

2012-04-27 Thread Hal Murray
Fun talk at the USGS last (Thur) night: ShakeAlert! --building an earthquake early warning system for California by Doug Given He's a good speaker. If you get a chance to hear him, go for it. http://online.wr.usgs.gov/calendar/ The video should be up in their archives in a few days.

Re: [time-nuts] GPS, USGS Early Earthquake Warning

2012-04-27 Thread Hal Murray
The quake talk was not on line so I watched the one on Climate Change and it's impact on N. California. Interesting, but no human impact data, only wildlife. It's up now. http://online.wr.usgs.gov/calendar/2012/apr12.html For a good time sink, my favorite talk was March 2011:

Re: [time-nuts] Trimble recommends RG-59 Antenna Cable.

2012-04-30 Thread Hal Murray
kenkub...@hotmail.com said: Hi Time-Nuts guys, I was reading the Trimble Thunderbolt manual section 2.1.3 (Antenna Cable). Trimble recommends using RG-59 cable which is 75 ohm coax. Is this a typo or is this correct? I thought that the Trimble Thunderbolt would use a 50 ohm cable and

Re: [time-nuts] GPS, USGS Early Earthquake Warning

2012-04-30 Thread Hal Murray
t...@leapsecond.com said: Related to that, are there any seismometer experts on the list? I've always wondered why they don't augment the extremely sensitive detectors with less sensitive detectors? Of course a really good detector will overload; so just co-locate cheap detectors that are 40

Re: [time-nuts] thunderbolt no UTC offset

2012-05-01 Thread Hal Murray
francesco.messi...@gmail.com said: I just powered on again my trimble thunderbolt after some time without antenna. All alarms are green but the obvious leap second pending. BUT: I can't use UTC time as both tboltmon and lady heather display a No UTC offset message. I don't remember having

Re: [time-nuts] Interesting paper: Don't GPSD' your Rb...

2012-05-05 Thread Hal Murray
p...@phk.freebsd.dk said: If you cannot apply the negative sawtooth, you will get better results by disciplining almost any random quartz xtal, ovenized or not to the GPS, divide it down to PPS and then discipline the PRS10 to that. I don't understand that. What am I missing? In the simple

Re: [time-nuts] Oh dear

2012-05-07 Thread Hal Murray
j...@quikus.com said: Suppose you have a perfect, ideal clock that puts out 'convert' pulses at an exact rate is used to strobe a high precision A/D. Now suppose you add jitter to that perfect clock so that the rate stays the same but time interval between successive pulses varies randomly

Re: [time-nuts] Faster than light of a different type

2012-05-07 Thread Hal Murray
c...@employees.org said: one more thing, people need to learn to hit the delete key if they don't like a particular email. get over it. I don't think that's a reasonable approach. Yes, of course, we should all be more tolerant. But that's only half the story. There is an interesting

Re: [time-nuts] Faster than light of a different type

2012-05-07 Thread Hal Murray
jim...@earthlink.net said: I wonder if the nature of email and how it gets read has any effect on usenet lists. Think back to expensive dialup days.. you'd dial up, download the batch, and then hangup. So you'd go through all the mail (almost like a digest) before responding. I think

Re: [time-nuts] Faster than light of a different type

2012-05-08 Thread Hal Murray
j...@jwsss.com said: At least let someone claim that this affects climate change before you condemn it or make a comment like this. On 5/7/2012 6:38 PM, Tom Knox wrote: Yea NIST and JILA keep pushing pseudo science, and they keep on recieveing the Noble Prize in Physics for these ideas.

[time-nuts] Clocks for Audio gear

2012-05-09 Thread Hal Murray
was Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Faster than light of a different type (Probably my fault.) act...@hotmail.com said: What I found funny was that the Audiophlie and light thread drew such attacks when it hit home to me as exactly what the Time-Nuts mission is about. The Audio thread touched on

Re: [time-nuts] Clocks for Audio gear

2012-05-10 Thread Hal Murray
albertson.ch...@gmail.com said: I've alway have thought that if nanosecond level jitter is bad then breathing while listening must be really bad. If you inhale the path length from your ear to the speaker changes at the microsecond level. You'd think the resulting doppler shift would drive

Re: [time-nuts] Clocks for Audio gear

2012-05-10 Thread Hal Murray
Are there any real audio systems with sinusoidal jitter. I'd goes that it would all be random. I can see where I could build a system with that defect if I wanted to but are there any systems on the market like this? I could easily imagine jitter with a significant sinusoidal

Re: [time-nuts] Clocks for Audio gear

2012-05-10 Thread Hal Murray
d...@irtelemetrics.com said: One interesting note however. Years ago we had a standard old 4040 ripple counter in our shop that displayed a low occurrence of jitter of several times it's input frequency period at it's lowest frequency output (Sort of what you are describing below). I wish

Re: [time-nuts] Trimble Resolution SMT - good/bad/indifferent?

2012-05-11 Thread Hal Murray
Why in the hell would anybody build a 50 channel receiver? At most you MIGHT see 12 usable GPS sats... I don't think that I've seen over 10. WAAS should be fairly useless for a timing receiver. I can think of a couple of reasons. I'm sure there are more. One would be marketing type

Re: [time-nuts] wwvb weak on east coast especially when the pre-amps under water.

2012-05-14 Thread Hal Murray
mag...@rubidium.dyndns.org said: I had the same problem with a GPS antenna at work. Somebody had put the manufactures label over the porus plug that should have vented out any water... but it didn't so I had too high water-level inside the antenna. How does water get in? I'm not doubting

Re: [time-nuts] wwvb weak on east coast especially when the pre-amps under wa...

2012-05-14 Thread Hal Murray
k3...@aol.com said: If you can keep the boards in a vertical mount position, and they have been sprayed with a conformal coating, the heat from the components and the coating will keep any moisture from forming on the boards in a vertical position. We do this in several products we supply

Re: [time-nuts] Trimble Resolution-T SMT caught behaving badly

2012-05-14 Thread Hal Murray
hol...@hotmail.com said: Then at the half way point, something strange happened... I've seen quite a few GPS receivers do strange things. My straw man is software bugs under poor signal conditions that don't get tested much. Another possibility would be a glitch on the power rail(s). It's

Re: [time-nuts] Why are 1PPS signals so skinny?

2012-05-15 Thread Hal Murray
saidj...@aol.com said: Also, the Thunderbolt has less than 5 Ohms output impedance, so you get a reflection going back from the 50 Ohms end-termination anyway because the impedance is mismatched! I think that's a different problem. If the far end termination matches the cable there won't

Re: [time-nuts] Why are 1PPS signals so skinny?

2012-05-15 Thread Hal Murray
rich...@karlquist.com said: FWIW, the E1938A oscillator control board had a happy light LED that flashed 1 time per second, and sure enough this corrupted the power supply and affected some applications. We added a command to turn it off. Why should lights blink when they are happy? Your

Re: [time-nuts] Buffering a PPS signal

2012-05-18 Thread Hal Murray
t...@leapsecond.com said: If this is for a computer and NTP then you may ignore the sawtooth. GPS receiver sawtooth corrections are for people working at the nanosecond level; important when you're working with disciplining quartz or rubidium oscillators with stability at the 1e-12 level.

[time-nuts] USGS: GPS for seismic work

2012-05-19 Thread Hal Murray
It wasn't hard to find the right people at the Open House. GPS is interesting for big quakes. Most seismometers measure acceleration. It's a double integration to get displacement which is what they are used to working with. Big quakes last longer which leads normal seismometers to get into

Re: [time-nuts] USGS: GPS for seismic work

2012-05-19 Thread Hal Murray
i...@blackmountainforge.com said: They also use GPS units for tectonic shift. Put a unit on each plate and measure the difference between them. When it gets to be a large enough number, something, somewhere will slip and you will have a quake. Yes, but that's the DC term. The

Re: [time-nuts] Re Serial Port Server

2012-05-22 Thread Hal Murray
bdsy...@yahoo.com said: I would not recommend building up a computer with numerous serial cards, as this solution is not as flexible. One advantage of serial cards is much better timing. It's also one less box that has to be working in order to get data. -- These are my opinions. I hate

Re: [time-nuts] Serial port server .. any interest in a write up on using ?

2012-05-22 Thread Hal Murray
ed_pal...@sasktel.net said: I've played with a Lantronix single port server and a Digi 16 port server with no problems for simple COM port emulation. But I wonder if they would work well with an NTP server. Has anyone tested that? Is the network delay a problem due to either amount of

Re: [time-nuts] Serial port server .. any interest in a write up on using ?

2012-05-22 Thread Hal Murray
li...@rtty.us said: I'd bet at least a cold order of french fries that you would be below 1 ms on a modern home wired LAN. Certainly everything I ping locally is sub 1 ms unless wireless is involved. The delay doesn't matter much. You can correct for it. I can measure sub ms even over a

Re: [time-nuts] Serial port server .. any interest in a write up on using ?

2012-05-23 Thread Hal Murray
att...@kinali.ch said: On an ethernet it looks quite different: [snip lots of low jitter samples] Network is a destkop - switch1 - switch2 - ntp box. The switches are two Level1 Gbit smart switches. The desktop is a ~4y old Xeon 2GHz system with a Gbit interface The ntp box is a AMD Geode

Re: [time-nuts] NTP latency monitoring

2012-05-28 Thread Hal Murray
ei6iz.bren...@gmail.com said: Anyone tinkered with measuring GPSd, NTPd and network delay tomography? No, but as the network admin for a reasonably large network, much of it wireless I'd like to explore this If you turn on rawstats in ntp.conf, it will collect the data for you. After

Re: [time-nuts] Antenna question about RHCP/LHCP I'm sure a time-nutcan answer

2012-06-04 Thread Hal Murray
t...@leapsecond.com said: http://www.ausairpower.net/Block-IIR-M-SV-1S.jpg What is the significance of the pointy tops of the long skinny antennas? How about the collars at the base of them? -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___

[time-nuts] GPS through windows

2012-06-04 Thread Hal Murray
Does window glass have significant attenuation at GPS L1? What if it's a big window on a modern green office building and has some sort of coating/content to reduce IR transmission? Google found an (expensive) paper from IEEE where the abstract said: At average, about 30 dB attenuation is

[time-nuts] Paywall rant

2012-06-05 Thread Hal Murray
li...@lazygranch.com said: Pay-walls on technical journals have to go. The IEEE doesn't pay the author for the article. They used to make the author pay a small fee. Anyway, the exorbitant fees of technical journals discourages cross-discipline research. You can't be a member of every one of

Re: [time-nuts] GPS / GNSS front-end board

2012-06-08 Thread Hal Murray
* Connect all free pins of the FPGA to a 2.54mm header pin connector Don't go overboard on the all if that makes a mess of the routing or layout. Be sure to put enough ground pins on the header(s). Power too. -- These are my opinions. I hate spam.

Re: [time-nuts] Thunderbolt cabling questions

2012-06-11 Thread Hal Murray
albertson.ch...@gmail.com said: But you know what? If you simply place an automotive puck type GPS antenna on your roof you have to do the same thing. It must be grounded the same way, same lightening protection and so on. So in the end you may as well put up a professional looking and

Re: [time-nuts] GPS NTP update on Mac OS-X 10.7.4

2012-06-13 Thread Hal Murray
I recently connected up a USB GPS to my Linux box and found it quite easy to get NTP to up from the GPS. I was hoping to get the same GPS to update the Mac running Lion 10.7.4, however, it has been a very frustrating uphill battle. Has anybody managed to get GPS NTP update working on OS-X?

Re: [time-nuts] Paper about DCF77 performance

2012-06-13 Thread Hal Murray
Do they grant the right, or do people just get away with it? We used to get away with it by publishing an in-house research report that was a preliminary version of what turned into the paper. That was many years ago, before the web. We actually printed hard copies. We had good in-house

Re: [time-nuts] Paper about DCF77 performance

2012-06-14 Thread Hal Murray
enge...@alumni.ethz.ch said: Building the best DCF77 receiver in the world :-) You have found the right place. :) -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to

Re: [time-nuts] Sidereal time

2012-06-15 Thread Hal Murray
namic...@gmail.com said: I have been trying to set up a clock on sidereal time. My only source of a time calculator is tycho.usno.navy.mil, but this seems to be off the air for the last week or more. Is there any other source of sidereal time? The basic method needs a current almanac and I

[time-nuts] Power glitch

2012-06-20 Thread Hal Murray
I had a power glitch last night. It shows up as a step on the 60 Hz clock-drift graph. That reminded me that I had another glitch a few weeks ago. 16 seconds: http://www.megapathdsl.net/~hmurray/time-nuts/60Hz/60Hz-2012-Jun-20-gap.png 0.1 second:

Re: [time-nuts] Power glitch

2012-06-21 Thread Hal Murray
david-tay...@blueyonder.co.uk said: Does the glitch mean you had a 16-second outage or what? I'm not clear. Yes. For the previous year or so, my local power has been very good. I've seen occasional off-by-one counts in both directions but nothing more interesting than that. I haven't

Re: [time-nuts] Clockwise?

2012-06-26 Thread Hal Murray
t...@leapsecond.com said: I'm very south of the equator on a family vacation right now, away from my lab, remote enough to miss the upcoming leap second. But here's a photo of a sundial I made with driftwood and shell markers every 5 minutes. Speaking of sundials, here is a neat one:

Re: [time-nuts] Power glitch

2012-06-27 Thread Hal Murray
david-tay...@blueyonder.co.uk said: Thanks for that, Hal. I would set up some monitoring myself except that I don't have a UPS so even a 16-second outage would not be recorded. Could use a portable PC, I suppose... We have perhaps one outage every two years on average, and they last for at

[time-nuts] Leap second coming...

2012-06-28 Thread Hal Murray
Everybody ready for the big event? :) For those of you who weren't here for the last one (or have forgotten)... Markus Kuhn as a nice program that records what happens to your computer's clock over the leap second. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/leap/test/timelog.c I'm in California,

Re: [time-nuts] Leap second coming...

2012-06-29 Thread Hal Murray
j...@jwsss.com said: I've got a note set for 6/29/2012 @ 5pm PST. Hopefully that is the right time. I think you are a day early. If not, I'm setting up to be a day late. (and I hope somebody will say something) That's Friday, the 29th. The leap second doesn't happen until Sat, 30th. I

Re: [time-nuts] Leap second coming...

2012-06-29 Thread Hal Murray
bill...@bellsouth.net said: Does the leapsecond get added just once (GMT time zone) or does it happen in a staggered fashion at the same hh:mm:ss within each timezone? The leap second gets added to UTC. I don't know how Windows works, but most Linux/Unix systems keep track of time in UTC

Re: [time-nuts] Leap second coming...

2012-06-29 Thread Hal Murray
I seem to remember someone from NPL telling me that they actually increment the each of the last 10 seconds before the epoch by 100mS, rather than putting in one whole second. Google has hacked their internal NTP servers to spread the extra second over several hours. That's slow enough so

[time-nuts] Leap from HP Z3801A (as seen from a Linux box)

2012-06-30 Thread Hal Murray
56108 86396.034 32 scpi T22012063023595730+0041 56108 86397.034 32 scpi T22012063023595830+0042 56108 86398.036 32 scpi T22012063023595930+0043 56108 86399.036 32 scpi T22012063023596030+003B === 56108 86399.034 32 scpi T2201207010030+0021 === 56109 0.037 32 scpi

Re: [time-nuts] Jackson Labs GPSTCXO - New Firmware

2012-07-03 Thread Hal Murray
One thing I described is how if the user messed up and didn't disable serial echo as described in the manual, the GPSTCXO could get so confused that it would reboot It's worth keeping that echo mess in mind. I spent way too much time chasing one the other day. For each of my toys with a

Re: [time-nuts] Allan Deviation question

2012-07-06 Thread Hal Murray
I think a number of higher-end sound cards accept a word clock or world clock (I've seen it both ways) that's intended to allow syncing to an external source. The challenge I've seen is that the frequency (either in the 12 or 24 MHz range) is one that's not simple to synthesize precisely

Re: [time-nuts] disciplining sound card

2012-07-06 Thread Hal Murray
azelio.bori...@screen.it said: [couple some 1-pps energy into the signal being digitized] Yes, very smart, this analog time-stamping approach. There is another trick you can use in this area. If you can watch a PPS signal, you can figure out the frequency of the clock used by the A/D system.

Re: [time-nuts] Temperature control/isolation of T-bolts...

2012-07-12 Thread Hal Murray
mp...@clanbaker.org said: Eventually, I tried putting it in a large picnic sized Styrofoam container. This worked much better. The inside temperature did go up, but not so much as to be a problem. At some point the size of the container provided enough heat loss so as not to overheat the

Re: [time-nuts] Thunderbolt mounting

2012-07-13 Thread Hal Murray
saidj...@aol.com said: We deal with big fans all the time, viz. Turboprop engines running at up to 2000rpm. Generates nasty massive spurs below 100hz. 2000 / 60 is 33.333 Hz One man's noise is another man's signal. (Or something like that. I think I picked it up here, ages ago.) How hard

Re: [time-nuts] Phase modulation detection/NIST plan

2012-07-13 Thread Hal Murray
d...@dieconsulting.com said: There are innumerable applications for low cost low power human level 1 second accurate time of day in modern electronic systems - examples are traffic lights and school crossing signs and water sprinklers and street lights and other outdoor lighting and many

Re: [time-nuts] WWVB a different approach to d-bpsk-r (cheating)

2012-07-19 Thread Hal Murray
As long as you don't have sunset or sunrise between you and the transmitter, WWVB is reasonably stable. At night you will get more signal, but also can have some skywave stuff in the mix. One man's noise is another man's signal. The NIST coverage maps vary widely from night to day. I

Re: [time-nuts] Timing Health Monitoring

2012-07-20 Thread Hal Murray
cq.k...@gmail.com said: I do not want to spend good money on another oscillicope if I can help it, but I do want to see, or at least be remotely aware of clock slips/walks and other anomalies. I am thinking about building an embedded system to automate monitoring, configuration, and

[time-nuts] TBolt vs Twisted pairs

2012-07-20 Thread Hal Murray
(From a month ago.) albertson.ch...@gmail.com said: Take my word for it, the T-Bolt is not able to drive a 100 foot long twisted pair cable I don't think that's quite the right way to phrase it. What type of twisted pair were you using and/or what sort of setup did you try? How well did

Re: [time-nuts] Zero-Crossing Detector Design?

2012-07-20 Thread Hal Murray
albertson.ch...@gmail.com said: Hysteresis does nothing to eliminate jitter or temperature Maybe, but it is absolutely needed if there is any noise on the signal. A perfect comparator with zero hysteresis would dither on every zero crossing. Hysteresis doesn't eliminate the dither from

Re: [time-nuts] Trimble T Lassen 2 - suitable antenna....advice.....questions

2012-07-23 Thread Hal Murray
squir...@gmail.com said: While i am on, can anyone suggest a reasonably priced unit that has a 1pps output, NMEA and a built in antenna. Because I want to use this with an 8 bit embedded system I am probably not going to be able to hack one of the many cheap USB dongle GPS's. Garmin GPS

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