[time-nuts] Help needed - sick Palisade

[steve platt]

I have a Trimble Palisade that may have become faulty. It will no longer 
come up from "cold" (power on) and lock on to any satellites.

It does respond on both serial ports and works with PalisadeMonitor (on 
port B) - I can upload time, position and almanac to it, after which it 
shows which satellites it is tracking. The trouble is my almanac file is 
now 6 months old (dumped from the GPS at a time when it was working).

Before giving up on it, I'd like to try uploading a fresh almanac.dat 
file (perhaps dumped from a working unit), just in case this improves 
its chance of getting a fix ... or if anyone knows of s/w to convert 
available almanac formats into the binary file that PalisadeMonitor uses 
I'd be very grateful.

Finally, if anyone knows what is possible using the Clear/Set CLock 
Offset "service" commands I'd like to learn more. The clock offset 
always displays as (about) -1500 Hz at startup and stays that way most 
of the time. I have written a program to manually set this to other 
values in the hope that changing the clock offset manually (perhaps 
together with a recent almanac) might get the unit working again.

So far I've had the unit out of doors for several days without it 
properly acquiring any satellites.

Optimistically yours,
Steve Platt, G4WSZ