I would still like to experiment with it. As I wrote earlier I bought this > for a frequency reference, not a clock, but I would not object to a bit of > fun messing around with it. > > If the goal is just getting good enough time onto the Solaris machine then use NTP and some pool servers on the Internet. You get about 10 millisecond level accuracy and the cost is zero. If you have solaris running you might even have this all setup and running. If not do this as the first step and verify it works.
If 10ms is unacceptable, next step is to connect the PPS signal. Doing this will move you from milli to micro second level accuracy. It is easy if the Solaris machine has a real serial port. If you have to go through a USB dongle you loose about an order of magnitude accuracy but this is still very good. There is zero point in buying a special computer to run NTP. Just use any computer you own that is already running 24x7. Of course if you don't have a computer that runs 24x7 then you would look for one that uses very little power. Don't worry to much if the USB connection skews the time on the NTP server by some tens of microseconds, your server can't transfer time to your other computers on the LAN any better than millisecond level so a few tenths of an millisecond hardly mater. My opinion of computer time is that for normal use being a few milliseconds off is OK because the typical monitor is refreshed no faster than 100Hz so you have lag cause by screen refresh times even if the internal clock is dead-on perfect. Same for disk time stamps, these is lag in the IO system too -- Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California _______________________________________________ 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.
