[ntp:questions] Change reference clock soon after DCF-signal islost

Rob nomail at example.com
Thu Jul 15 08:42:56 UTC 2010


Matuschka, Sebastian <Sebastian.Matuschka at gcd-solutions.de> wrote:
> The reason i want to switch very soon to another source when DCF77
> signal is lost, is that I have to tell a FPGA when it should use the
> DCF77 signal and when to use an alternative source. The FPGA doesn't
> decodes the time but it uses the DCF77 signal to increment its internal
> RTC.
> The MCU on which the ntpd runs has to decide whether the FPGA should use
> the DCF77 or a "once per second pulse" from the MCU.

I think this isn't a good design.

In my experience, DCF-77 reception is simply not stable enough to directly
use the pulses from the receiver as clock ticks.
When there are thunderstorms, local interference, and sometimes propagation
problems, there can be spurious extra pulses that you do not want to
count.  Or pulses can be missing.

A good way of using DCF-77 is to collect the 59 pulses that make up a
minute, average the offset between the pulse start and the local clock tick,
decode the time from the pulse lengths, and then at the end of the minute
decide if all this information is valid and should control the clock
(adjusting the clock offset/frequency), or should be discarded as a whole.

This is also what the DCF-77 drivers in ntpd do.




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