[ntp:questions] Ultralink 325 WWVB receiver
Dennis Hilberg, Jr.
timekeeper at dennishilberg.com.invalid
Sun Feb 17 06:49:29 UTC 2008
Rob Kimberley wrote:
> Interesting plots! Have tried to make some sense of them, but rather
> difficult.
>
> 1) How is the Rx powered? (I don't know the product)
It's powered from the RS232 connection currently. It also has an external
5V DC power supply that can be used instead.
> 2) Do you know what type of oscillator is used in the Rx, and how it is
> supposed to be controlled?
The only thing I could find regarding that in the user's manual is this
brief statement:
"A microcomputer processes WWVB signals, maintains an accurate real time
clock and hosts the serial communication interface. Received data is
correlated over time to set an internal real-time clock (RTC). The RTC is
driven by a precision quartz crystal for continuous accurate time reference."
> 3) The changes in offset don't appear to follow any regular 24 hour pattern,
> so would tend to rule out diurnal effects, plus the changes are much larger
> than one would expect.
I haven't ruled out the possibility of interference yet. Although, according
to my clockstats file, it gets an R5 signal (R1 being unreadable signal and
R5 the best) a large portion of the time. In fact the clockstats file for
the 16th of Feb. showed R2 - R5 about 85 percent of the time. Is it possible
that even though the signal is strong some interference is affecting the
unit's accuracy?
> I notice a large step around 02:00 on a Saturday.
> Does anything large get switched off/on at this time? Thinking along the
> lines of some sort of power surge causing interference to the receiver.
Normally my Windows machine shuts down via the Task Scheduler at 2am every
day, after some backups take place. But this last time the machine running
the WWVB receiver (apollo) restarted somehow shortly after that time. I
don't know what happened as /var/log/messages doesn't show anything.
The odd thing about the WWVB receiver is the initial offset on an ntpd
restart is not consistent and ntpd pretty quickly declares it a falseticker.
I have to manually fudge the time1 setting with ntpdc, otherwise it will
stay a falseticker.
Anyway, that's why the offset converged real close to zero early Saturday
morning, as you can see on the janus graph, as ntpd declared the WWVB
receiver a falseticker after the reboot, and synced to saturn (the machine
running the GPS reference), which janus (the observation machine) is also
synced to.
> More later (and apologies for the delay in replying)
No worries, I'm thankful for any assistance.
> Rob Kimberley
Dennis
--
Dennis Hilberg, Jr. \ timekeeper(at)dennishilberg(dot)com
NTP Server Information: \ http://saturn.dennishilberg.com/ntp.php
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