Hi,
It kind of depends. The Z3801A was really crafted to meet the needs of
CDMA mobile stations. That had it's life-span. Other GPSDOs can sit for
very long time and when they fail, much around them can have changed, or
mostly things have been added.
It used to be that GPSes could be installed and no real intention to
upgrade existed. Some where even questionable if they could be upgraded
during their lifetime, where as others could maybe be upgraded in the
field or at least required the vendors service organisation being
involved. Others was dead easy to upgrade in the field by the user. Very
few firms still support their oldest devices, but it seems to be mostly
because they can and they like the challenge. For some reason, being
able to upgrade it in the field, remotely in secure way and still have
support enough to do it has creeped into requirements. I helped to push
that. DHS published it and we just started an IEEE standard for it.
Little bit of a side-track, but never the less. Awareness have increased.
Cheers,
Magnus
On 2021-10-12 18:58, Bob kb8tq wrote:
Hi
If a cell tower is running for 5 years without an upgrade, that’s doing pretty
well.
Ten years is an eternity in this case. Even for core network stuff, the
“expected
lifetime” in the spec rarely makes it to 20 years and pretty much never goes
past
that (in the spec.). Does the stuff last longer? In some cases it most
certainly does.
Is the firmware still supported after X years? ….. hmmmm….
One way to “see” this is to take a look at the date codes on this gear as it
shows
up on eBay. The 3801’s headed out into the field in the late 90’s and became a
“thing” for Time Nuts to buy and poke at by the early 2000’s.
How you factor in the delay between being pulled out of service in who knows
where, auctioned off, shipped to China, parted out, parts resold, and listed on
eBay is
unclear. I’d bet they go by slow boat heading over there ….
Bob
On Oct 12, 2021, at 12:27 PM, Hal Murray <halmurray+timen...@sonic.net> wrote:
kb...@n1k.org said:
I???ve run 3801???s for years and years without ever power cycling them. Other
than power supply failure, they never had a problem. They did get detailed
monitoring pretty much all the time.
I was guessing that the reboot-every-few-months recipe was trying to dance
around the week number roll over issue.
Has anybody figured out where/when it writes whatever it needs so that it
comes up right on power up?
On the initial application (cell towers?), was there any expectation of
lifetime? In particular were they expected to keep going over WNRO and/or was
there a difference between run over WNRO and spares sitting on the shelf
coming up after WNRO?
--
These are my opinions. I hate spam.
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