[time-nuts] GPS choices.

Michael Tharp gxti at partiallystapled.com
Mon Sep 9 14:33:05 EDT 2013


On 9/9/2013 11:08, Paul wrote:
> Although the inexpensive yet high sensitivity units are nice I'm not
> sure why someone would choose a positioning MTK (e.g. Adafruit) over a
> timing Ublox (or even an old Motorola style timing receiver).
>
> Am I missing something?

In a word, availability. Try buying a NEO-6T in quantity of less than a 
reel (hundreds of pieces), for less than $180 (cost of a sample direct 
from u-blox). NEO-6M can be bought in small quantities on the grey 
market, for example aliexpress has dozens of such vendors. You also have 
many choices of evaluation board if you don't want the raw module.

Good positioning modules like NEO-6M are more than sufficient for less 
demanding applications like NTP, and even have some timing features like 
sawtooth correction. It also has a "stationary" mode that isn't really 
position hold but at least tunes the algorithm to assume the antenna 
usually isn't moving.

> Also is the (up to) 10MHz output from a 6T as useful as it seems it
> should be given ~30/15ns quoted accuracy?

Not sure but I suspect you wouldn't want to use it directly. Locking a 
OCXO to it would be trivial.


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