[time-nuts] ideas so far for first GPS, NTP project

Frank Hughes hp_ciscovss at yahoo.com
Sun Aug 19 00:52:45 UTC 2012


Hi,
Thanks for all the great tips and advice!
Quite a bit to absorb, but that is the fun part.

Probably not going to spend much more time trying to fix the 3336C OCXO,
but I will take it apart and check some basic things. 
The regulator is OK @ 14.1VDC, and the large metal BNC<->BNC jumper is installed properly on the back panel. 
So it is going to be a bad crystal or other flaky discrete component
causing the 6Mhz output. 

The Jackson labs Fury sounds good to me, will save time for other 
phases of the project to provision the core as plug-n-play.

I have a Grass Valley 8X6 Video DA that I'll try first for 10Mhz distribution. 
If the S/N ratio is too high, I'll try something else. 

(HP 5087A is "Plan-B", many on EB, but it is difficult for me to determine which options/boards 
the vendors have in them - I'm not sure what to ask for) 

I would appreciate suggestions for an antenna - there are many on EB w/ "N" connectors. 
I understand about the importance of placement and altitude, plenty of room here, 
and I have quite a bit of left-over LMR-400 and LMR-600-DB, so loss won't be a problem.

As for the NTP, I had hoped for a 1 or 2 RU server (Symmetricom/Datum), just to make it simple to target my Linux, Mac clients @ a small cool running platform I can leave on 24x7. 

All my Ubuntu and Fedora boxes are on old, hot, power hog platforms, and thus, I don't run them 24x7.
I'll ask the kids @ work about the newer, energy efficient platforms I can run UBUNTU on.

They recently introduced me to ORACLE VirtualBox, now I have an XP running in Ubuntu for things that just must have windoze. 
The only problem is getting the VirtualBox XP COM port to find and use the Ubuntu serial card.

73
Frank
KJ4OLL


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