This will be the first part of a larger project that will include other friends that have collaborated with me directly or indirectly this last year. It was in many ways, a funny and interesting project to follow. All schematics, codes and results are free for use , please just give references to authors. USE CAUTION […]
Time has come to make some measure and view the actual performance of some time and frequency standards that I’ve got here.In the market, there are many instruments that can perform this kind of job: frequency counters and time interval counters for example. Since I can not afford instruments such as the Microsemi 5120a, A7-MXU […]
Recently i’ve found some great codes from Tom Van Baak (Leapsecond) and use them as frequency dividers. You can find the *.hex and *.asm here I’ve burned some PIC 12F675 using a PIC programmer to have some CMOS TTL frequencies for various applications One of them was to use the M100, a great military Rubidium […]
In an age when time synchronization is getting vital and faster (NTP) and more accurate (PTP – IEEE 1588 ) with increasingly high performance network protocols, there are still glorious time codes used to synchronize time reference units or clients on primary time and frequency standards .One of them it is the IRIG-B. Recently i […]
I’ve tested the server into two different environments: LAN and WAN. I confirm the relatively small capacity of the Soekris to support 200-300 units connected to it for NTP UDP as ideal load without alter performances.Of course the major limits comes with Ethernet , T1 and line speed. We could never get nanoseconds over there […]
All is mounted inside my old 2850 rack case, ready to launch The software it’is basically a shell script that resides in FreeBSD sources , and usually you can find it as nanobsd.sh under the folder /usr/src/tools/tools/nanobsd/ . It creates a very little version of FreeBSD that fit into a common 512 MB Compact Flash card. […]
First operative test of the RB Stratum 1 Server Following Poul-Henning Kamp project to modify a 4501 router to build a Stratum 1 NTP server , I’ve decided to build my own using instead a Rubidium Frequency standard source of 10 MHz to clock the Elan processor inside the Soekris. It requires some hardware changes […]
I Recently found a couple of Lucent RFTG at less than 200$, always on eBay ,from a stock in California. These Redundant Frequency and Time Generator, or RFTG were used in big Cell stations to provide high frequency standards. it’s also available the “yellow tuna” type, the RFG-RB, that is of course more expensive and […]
The Raspberry Pi B 512 MB connected to my “old” Aspire One with a crossover cable If you need precise and accurate time for your projects while sampling a digital record or doing something that need precise timestamps you can use a Raspberry Pi with the Adafruit Breakout GPS module to build a stratum 1 NTP […]
What are we talking about? Today I’ll talk about this magnificent little device found on eBay : the Efratom M-100.First of all, what is a Rubidium Frequency Standard? It’s an atomic clock.Just in the 80-90 they were such an expansive units! The working mechanism is fascinating. It uses the hyperfine transition of electrons in rubidium-87 atoms […]
Delta² 