It appears that they are brand new... no signs of ever being handled or
installed. The anti-static bag is sealed with a yellow warning sticker. The
date codes in the firmware/software ID message indicates year 2000. The
manufacture date message returns 0's in all the fields.
They have a DC-DC converter module soldered to the PCB. The second board in
the stack is the Motorola timing receiver. These are OEM boards like the gold
boxed Thunderbolts, not the metal boxed "retail" units like the Trimble "red
box" Thunderbolts. The connectors are a match to the Trimble units, except
the RS-232 connector is a male and requires a null modem cable/adapter.
And for your viewing pleasure, a few more warty warts... a couple of times an
hour the UTC offset field reports 0 even though the receiver has a proper UTC
offset value.
In the TSIP binary protocol any 0x10 bytes must be sent as 0x10 0x10. The
end-of-message flag is 0x10 0x03. If a message contains more than one 0x10
byte, there is a very good chance that the Starloc will send 0x10 0x10 as the
end-of-message flag instead of 0x10 0x03! This causes the next message to be
merged with the previous one, and it will not be decoded.
The satellite health message (0x59) should have a info type byte followed by 32
bytes of info flags (one for each possible satellite). Our fiends, the
intrepid Starloc coders, send an info type byte of 00 (invalid, should be 3 or
6) followed by 31 bytes of 0's.
Ahh, the ephemeris status message (0x5B) should have 16 bytes of data in it.
Starloc gives you 15 bytes of zeroes.
The tracked satellite list message (0x6D) has a byte that says how many bytes
of satellite ID numbers follow it... good ole' Starloc sends however many
bytes if ID's it wants to. The count byte is pretty much useless and if the
two don't match, well, the message is bogus.
The satellite solutions message (8F:A7) should have lots of useful info in it
like per-satellite clock bias. Well Starloc sends a message with just 13 bytes
of who know what... I don't... it ain't nuthin' like what Trimble documents...
_______________________________________________
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.
