Is this good value, and a trusted seller? I went looking for "Fluke1" as listed earlier on here for these devices (Thunderbolt GPS disciplined referenced sources) but though I (eventually) found the user, no activity was shown for some time. So, I went looking for the product instead, and found (among other things) this item 170344432395 (you know where to look.)
My intended main application, is to drive a local NTP server (Network Time Protocol) as I'm getting more and more P'd off with my ISP's ineptitude in maintaining a network where NTP (or anything else not related to web crawling or email) works with any reliability. (Huge and variable latency, ping to ping, at different times of day, confirmed by other users of the same ISP.) I run (just because I can!) a HF beacon monitor station, running the Faros software from Alex VE3NEA. That uses NTP and only NTP to synchronise it's software clock. (http://www.dxatlas.com/Faros/) The results of that can be seen at http://g8kbv.homeip.net:8008/ The white delay spots illustrate where the NTP source is messed up. The 10MHz output would perhaps be useful, once I have modified a radio or two to use that as a reference for their synthesizers, but that is not necessary as yet. I had a GPS with a 1pps output, but due to a PSU malfunction, it doesnt work any more sadly. :-( Mind you, I'm, still having difficulty configuring a FreeBSD box for NTP server use. The instructions to do so I have are good it seems (http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/FreeBSD-GPS-PPS.htm) just that the system does not seem to co-operate, and I'm not that familiar with Linux/FreeBSD etc at the basic user level, let alone re-compiling the kernel. As evidenced by a non booting system, the two times I eventually got it to compile (that takes hours to complete) and that was not even with modified sources, just what came on the CD unmolested. As each reload takes an age, I sort of lost the plot with that method! The local Linux User Group is not that much help either, no one has any experience with this sort of "engineering" thing. Ultimately, I'd like to run something like this on a non-PC hardware platform. Does anyone on this list know of a ready to run appliance, or preconfigured boot CD of this sort? Providing a LAN NTP source from GPS, for not much more than the cost of one of the Thunderbolts or similar? There are lots of commercial offerings, but way outside my price budget, this is for a hobby after all. Changing ISP would be a hassle, and there is no garantee that any other ISP wouldnt do the same silly thing, seemingly throttling private users WAN traffic during the day, though they say they don't. The ISP support people didnt even know what NTP was when I contacted them, then said that so long as there were no lost packets, ping delays of up to 250ms were acceptable!! Half the trouble seems to be, as a result of them appearing to now be running their NTP servers on the same machines as their border gateway systems, based on IP addresses and service names. Ideas anyone? Regards. Dave B. G0WBX. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
