[time-nuts] Receiving the MSF time signal on cheap radio modules

[paul swed]

Deirdre,
Great discussion on my favorite topic. I am the guy on the other side of
the lake that curses MSFs interference with WWVB.
I did indeed cheat by using the GPS time and 1 second tick to recreate the
WWVB timecode bits to remove the psk shifts in the received signal here on
the east coast. This allowed phase tracking receivers to correctly work
again.
Did MSF finally go to a BPSK signal format? I heard they were considering
that.
regards
Paul
WB8TSL

On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 4:26 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk>
wrote:

> --------
> In message <A2B31A8C-147B-4D35-BDC2-8D64D3743226 at n1k.org>, Bob kb8tq
> writes:
>
> >If you want to get even more “nutty", look at the “seed” that you likely
> already have
> >for the computation. In this day and age, you probably know what day /
> month / year it is.
>
> So, some of us think of that as cheating :-)
>
> >Since you might not (say) know the hour, you have a +/- 1 day sort of
> tolerance on that. It rolls
> >into month and year in some cases. The seed adds complexity, but probably
> makes
> >things more robust.
>
> I tried it, and it gave surprisingly little benefit.
>
> Unless very fast initial aquisition is your goal (why?!) you get a
> more robust result by not "cheating", since in real life at some
> point your RTC chip will contain bogus values.
>
> If you go the SDR route and decode DCF77 and MSF (and 162kHz France,
> WWV/B, the japanese signal at 40kHz and the russian at 200/3 kHz for
> that matter) in parallel, it is perfectly fair to expect them all
> to have the same date (modulus timezones).
>
> And yes, I would really *love* to se a colaborative project that
> produced an "all-world VLF timecode SDR-receiver"...
>
> >One cute thing is that this stuff is (in general) not very compute
> intensive. If data past the
> >minute tick is being looked at, you probably can afford to run multiple
> parallel solutions (even
> >on a < $5 MCU).
>
> The NTPns ran on a Soekris4501 and I was never able to measure a
> difference in power having the DCF77 blame code running or not.
>
> After all, it's only sixty trival patterns to match once a second...
>
> --
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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