[time-nuts] Lady Heather for homebrew GPSDO

Mark Sims holrum at hotmail.com
Sat Dec 17 20:28:28 EST 2016


If you are going to a GPSDO interface,  I would bite the bullet and recommend the Trimble TSIP / Thunderbolt commands.  It has its warts, but has commands for doing just about anything a GPSDO should do.  Doing a decent job would not be easy...  Nobody seems to have done a decent job emulating a Motorola receiver, and that is an easier thing to do.

The lazy bastard way would be cramming so proprietary NMEA sentences into a NMEA-like stream.

Polled interfaces like the Z3801A are horrible things for a computer to talk to.  If you miss a response or one gets garbled it can be difficult to recover from.  The Z801A is the worst possible interface... it's responses to requests have nothing in them to identify what request the values  are in response to.  

Heather really likes to see a device that sends regular time packets every second without having to request them.  Sending device status / TIC readings, temperature, etc is also a good thing.


More information about the time-nuts mailing list