[time-nuts] Is my Acutime broken ?

Adam Feigin awf at iis.ee.ethz.ch
Sun Dec 20 07:42:01 UTC 2009


I recently picked up an Acutime off of Ebay. I'm wondering if

1) The acutime is broken
2) There's something wrong with the cheapo USBtoRS422 convertor
3) My wiring

It appears to function, but exhibits strange behavior. Here are 3 URLs
with pngs of screenshots from the (they're 20K each, but I figured I'd
save the bandwidth here)

1) http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~feigin/acutime/allespaletti.png

This would appear to be in normal operation

2) http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~feigin/acutime/doingfixesnosvdata.png

Here's an instance where the acutime indicates its in OD mode, but shows
no SV signal data

3) http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~feigin/acutime/only2usablesv.png

Here's where its about 1/2 way done its site-survey, indicating that it
only has 2 SVs available, and yet the SV data shows 7 satellites, 6
with  > 50 dbc/hz values


Other strange behavior includes TR_Mon giving me "Floating point
Overflow" errors, the product info window being sometimes completely
empty, and other generally "weird" happenings. It does, however, on a
Power Cycle, "do the right thing", gets the time from the first SV, and
then going to OD mode when enough SVs are visible. I can even factory
default it, and it will then do a site survey, and then go to OD mode....

If its broke, thats (not really) fine, as I didn't pay all that much for
it, and before I invest the time and effort making a cable for it (man,
those Deutsch connectors are expensive!), I'd like to know for sure. Or
perhaps its something else I missed.

Thanks for any pointers




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