[time-nuts] Jupiter-T

Tom Clark w3iwi at toad.net
Wed Aug 3 13:15:49 EDT 2005


   Rick Putz asked

To All,
Has anyone done any studies on the Nav Man Jupiter T and Pico T series receiver
s? They use the SiRF chip set and provide a 10 Khz output that is said to be co
herent with the 1PPS.
Just curious.

   I did a lot of testing on the Jupiter-T that has an ONCORE VP physical
   footprint and MOT compatible command set.
   First of all, it is NOT the SiRF chipset. As I understand it,
   Collins/Rockwell sold their semiconductor operation lock, stock &
   silicon to the C/R spinoff Connexant, and it was Connexant that built
   the Jupiter-T with C/R parts and knowledge. Then Connexant's GPS was
   sold to SiRF, except that the Jupiter C/R series was sold to NavMan in
   New Zealand.
   So, under the assumption that the Jupiter-T you mention is the ONCORE
   footprint that I tested, here are a few answers. As a GPS receiver,
   the Jupiter-T is quite good, and better in fact than the old ONCORE
   VP. It is a 12 channel unit (ONCORE=8) so it can track more satellites
   and seemed to me to have better RF sensitivity. The Jupiter-T 1PPS
   timing is derived from a ~40 MHz clock, so that the sawtooth is only
   25 pk-to-pk nsec in amplitude (ONCORE=9.5 MHz with 104 nsec pk-to-pk).
   The 10kPPS is coherent with the 1PPS and has the same 25 nsec pk-to-pk
   sawtooth jitter. Both of these differences were reduced in the more
   modern M12+.
   However, the Jupiter-T lacks the serial data output that tells the
   sawtooth error on the next pulse (ONCORE has message with +/- 127 nsec
   in 1 nsec steps). As I understand it, the MOT's generate 1PPS via a
   looonnnggg (> 1 second) counter that counts the rcvr clock and the
   quantization error can be reported. The Jupiter-T generates its 1 &
   10k PPS thru an NCO, and the starting phase is not stored in the
   receiver; for this reason they never tried to reconstruct the error.
   I built a 10 MHz locker using the Jupiter-T and TvB's PIC-based
   synchronous counter with the idea that the 10 kHz jitter could be
   averaged out. The only problem came when the Jupiter-T went thru one
   of its clock zero-beat times (TvB calls them "hanging bridges") when
   the oscillator being locked got pulled off frequency. Alas, I
   abandoned that project!
   73, Tom



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