[ntp:questions] Re: Good and cheap GPS receivers (was: Reference clocks - which?)

Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wolfgang+gnus20041030T125048 at dailyplanet.dontspam.wsrcc.com
Sat Oct 30 20:11:27 UTC 2004


Helmut Wollmersdorfer <helmut at wollmersdorfer.at> writes:
> As the only possibility in my location is to mount a small,
> weatherproof antenna/receiver to the _vertical_ frame of window,
> giving a view of approximately 60 by 80 degrees to sky, covered around
> 50% by trees, I am not sure, how good the GPS signals will be.

Unless you can mount the antenna and/or the whole gps on the roof,
getting a GPS will be nothing but an aggravation.  GPS is roughly 1.5
Ghz and line of sight.  Ideally you would want to see at least a
90-degree cone (eg. +/- 45-degrees) of the sky facing straight up.  I
had an antenna in the window for a few weeks and it hardly worked at
all.

Now you don't really need a very expensive antenna on the roof.  Any
consumer GPS antenna will do just fine.  Old ethernet "thin-net" cable
will work just fine for bringing the signal inside.  The only hard
part is figuring out how the run the cable. ;-)

BTW.  I've had my synergy $100 eval kit hooked up to a cheap roof
antenna for quite a number of years.  For a while they had both
*development* kits (very expensive) and eval kits which were just the
boards and came with nothing in the way of documentation.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht                http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/



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