[ntp:questions] New to group: radio/audio interest

Alan Corey ab1jx at devio.us
Wed May 9 03:39:33 UTC 2012


I must admit I find NTP fascinating, depending on my mood.  About 20 years
ago I had written something that attempted to measure the drift in my
computer's clock based on daily *manual* settings while listening to WWV or
CHU.  Room temperature was the biggest factor.  I'm still interested in the
audio WWV and CHU reference clocks.  I don't own a GPS and I live in the
boonies where the only internet connection is dialup.  I'm 57, retired,
partially disabled, and I like programming.  I'm also a ham, but not very
active.  I've got a bio at http://www.qrz.com/db/ab1jx and a small homepage
at http://ab1jx.webs.com.

My current project is to get the wwv and chu clocks working under OpenBSD. 
I either don't have any audio getting to my refclock_wwv still or
wwv_receive isn't getting called.  I got audio settings close at least by
sticking (void) system("audioctl -a") in audio_info() to dump the settings out
then putting this in audio_init:

#else /* not PCM_STYLE_SOUND */
         AUDIO_INITINFO(&info);  /* makes a mess */
#if (!defined(__OpenBSD__))
         info.play.gain = AUDIO_MAX_GAIN;
         info.play.port = AUDIO_SPEAKER;
#else /* is OpenBSD */
         info.record.encoding = AUDIO_ENCODING_ULAW; // default: slinear_le
         info.record.sample_rate = 8000; // default: 48000, has to be 8000
         info.record.channels = 1; /* default is 2 */
#endif

Then today I got serial port control of my radio (Icom IC-7000) working by
opening it like this:

#if defined (__OpenBSD__)
         fd = tty_open(device,O_RDWR | O_NOCTTY | O_NDELAY, 0777);
#else
         fd = tty_open(device, O_RDWR, 0777);
#endif

Now I can turn on the radio, set it to some frequency, then when I start
ntpd it jumps right to 15 MHz

So I'm gradually getting closer, but I'm running out of ideas.  I stick in
little msyslog messages to check on things, but I can't get anything in
wwv_receive to respond.  I can get responses from wwv_start() and
wwv_newgame() but that's about it.  And I don't see what's supposed to call
it.

The complexity of this daunts me.  Just today I figured out: A struct peer
has a pointer to a struct refclockproc which has a pointer to
a struct refclockio which has a pointer to wwv_receive().  When I dig too
deep I can't see the forest for the trees and I keep making little notes
files all over the place.

I have clockstats enabled but nothing ever appears there.  I can boot the
same computer into Linux and ntpd works, so I've been comparing, and I use
the same ntp.conf file.

   Alan



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