[ntp:questions] Fwd: Re: NetBSD GPS/PPS using 4.2.6p3
A C
agcarver+ntp at acarver.net
Wed Aug 24 07:52:40 UTC 2011
First, I want to thank everyone that participated thus far in the thread
for a lot of help. I don't think this is quite the end because there's
still some strange things going on but...
I DID (FINALLY) get PPS to work. However, I discovered many interesting
things that I'm going to describe and see if it makes sense to all of
you. I welcome your comments on this new data.
On my system, GPS_NMEA and PPS_ATOM do not work together at all. On the
contrary they seem to interfere with each other.
For the system configuration, the GPS receiver is physically attached to
serial port B and available via /dev/ttyb. I have two symlinks to
/dev/ttyb, one is /dev/gps1 and the other is /dev/pps1.
It turns out that PPS_ATOM is transmitting something (I don't know what
yet, I'll have to make a splitter cable and monitor the serial data) TO
the GPS every second. I left the configuration without GPS_NMEA and
only turned on PPS_ATOM with flag2 1 flag3 1 and it actually found the
PPS clock and synchronized. Until now I had been using GPS_NMEA all the
time with no luck at all. I think I tried PPS_ATOM once but may not
have set flag2 so that would be my fault. I was trying to combine GPS
and PPS and overlooked PPS only when it failed the first time thinking I
needed GPS, too (in fact I had the GPS set to "prefer" during some of
that PPS_ATOM testing and then gave up on it).
On the box that holds the GPS receiver board, I actually have installed
a PPS LED plus two additional LEDs for TX and RX activity. When I
removed GPS_NMEA completely and left only the PPS_ATOM driver I could
see the RX (meaning data flowing INTO the GPS receiver) was pulsing once
per second (even before kernel PPS had been activated the PPS_ATOM
driver was still transmitting something).
When I turned on GPS_NMEA using no flags and also using 'noselect', the
transmissions by PPS_ATOM stopped completely and the PPS refclock
failed. Instead, the RX LED flickered once in a while each time
GPS_NMEA sent a message (presumably the $PMOTG,RMC,0000*1D sentence).
PPS_ATOM didn't work at all in this case (always reported as unreachable
and in the logs it says "kern PPS no signal").
Additionally, GPS_NMEA with flag3 enabled shows the same behavior as the
combination of GPS_NMEA and PPS_ATOM. Specifically, there is no RX
activity at the GPS receiver every second, only once in a while, and
again I get the error "kern PPS no signal".
So it seems like a port contention issue though I don't understand why
given documentation that says I should be able to run both or run the
PPS code on the GPS_NMEA driver. If GPS_NMEA has control of the port,
any PPS code is getting locked out of the transition data. However, if
only PPS_ATOM is enabled and GPS_NMEA is left off, then PPS_ATOM is
controlling the whole port and also sending data to it on a regular basis.
Here's the config with both clocks enabled:
server 127.127.20.1 minpoll 4 mode 1 noselect
fudge 127.127.20.1 time2 0.245 refid GPS
server 127.127.22.1
fudge 127.127.22.1 flag2 1 flag3 1 refid PPS
Here's the log with both clocks enabled:
24 Aug 07:08:48 ntpd[9415]: PPS(1) 802b 8b clock_event clk_no_reply
24 Aug 07:09:51 ntpd[9415]: 130.207.160.51 963a 8a sys_peer
24 Aug 07:09:51 ntpd[9415]: 0.0.0.0 061d 0d kern PPS enabled
24 Aug 07:09:51 ntpd[9415]: 0.0.0.0 062d 0d kern PPS no signal
24 Aug 07:10:04 ntpd[9415]: ntpd exiting on signal 2
ntpq shows that the PPS clock is never reached in this configuration.
And here is only PPS_ATOM enabled (GPS_NMEA commented out):
24 Aug 07:13:53 ntpd[21285]: 0.0.0.0 c615 05 clock_sync
24 Aug 07:14:56 ntpd[21285]: PPS(1) 8024 84 reachable
24 Aug 07:14:56 ntpd[21285]: PPS(1) 973a 8a sys_peer
24 Aug 07:14:56 ntpd[21285]: 0.0.0.0 011d 0d kern PPS enabled
And the output from ntpq -p (other network clocks trimmed):
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
o127.127.22.1 .PPS. 0 l 64 64 377 0.000 0.019 0.061
The 'o' symbol is there and the PPS is reachable.
I haven't included the logs for GPS_NMEA only (without PPS_ATOM) and
flag3 enabled but they look the same as GPS_NMEA with PPS_ATOM.
Any thoughts about all of this? I certainly have a little less hair
than I did when I started. However, I'd still like to get GPS_NMEA
working or at least understand why GPS_NMEA and PPS_ATOM kill each other.
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