[ntp:questions] Re: Good GPS for attic?

David Schwartz davids at webmaster.com
Sun Feb 13 02:22:15 UTC 2005


"Danny Mayer" <mayer at gis.net> wrote in message 
news:mailman.111.1108257465.583.questions at lists.ntp.isc.org...

>> > how about getting the atomic clock time via internet?
>> >
>> > Matt

>>     Sadly, this doesn't really work. The problem is that to request the
>>time, you have to send out a request and then wait for a reply. Unless the
>>request takes exactly as long to get to the clock as the reply takes to 
>>get
>>back, you have no idea what to do with the time when you receive it.
>>
>>     Say you send out a request for the time and get a reply 30 
>> milliseconds
>>later. The time in the reply was correct sometime between when you 
>>received
>>it and 30 milliseconds before that. You can 'guess' 15 milliseconds,
>>assuming it took as long for the query to get to the clock as it took the
>>reply to get to you, but this is no more than a guess. Your time can be as
>>much as 15 milliseconds off.

> Dave Mills is much smarter than that. He originally wrote the code some
> 25 years ago when the internet was young and unreliable (relatively).
> One of the fundamental assumptions was that the time to send and the
> time to receive would probably NOT be symmetic. In fact it wasn't
> even assumed that if you sent a packet it would arrive or if it arrived
> you would receive the packet or that it would return on the same path
> that the original packet used.
>
> The algorithms are that good.

    I'm afraid that it is fundamentally impossible to detect or correct for 
fundamentally asymetric delay. I am well aware of the available solutions 
and their limitations.

    I am not saying "don't use NTP to synchronize to an atomic clock over 
the Internet". I am saying, however, that there are a huge class of problems 
for which sychronizing over the 'net is no substitute for a local reference 
source. And now that GPS is so cheap, so reliable, and so easy to implement, 
there really aren't any excuses not to use it for many situations.

    DS





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