[geeks] ntp rant

[Dave McGuire]

On January 9, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> I personally don't see why anyone would want better NTP than can already
> be provided by syncing to any of the many available stratum-2 servers.

  Thank heaven *everyone* doesn't have that attitude, otherwise
there'd be no stratum-1 servers.

> Good NTP stratum-1 clocks are necessarily very expensive because they do
> things that no average person ever needs to do.  If you really want one
> to work well you've got to get a very stable oscillator to use with
> whatever time source you have (eg. GPS), and a good one can cost upwards
> of over $5,000.00, even used.

  Nah.  Good rubidium primary standards can be had for $1K or so, and
rubidium oscillator modules can be gotten for about $400.

> Normal people don't need to do that kind of thing.  Only if you're
> running a TV station or something similar that needs guaranteed 24x7
> time accurate to a millisecond or so.

  What's "normal"?  I suspect there are very few "normal" people here.
Many of us hack on all sorts of different things that you may or may
not be interested in.  I can assure you, however, that anyone who
wants to do something like this probably has something better in mind
than the output of the "date" program.

  Personally, I built most of a cesium-based stratum-1 server because I
*could*.  I had all the analog hardware for running calibrations of
secondary frequency standards, so why not do a little extra work and
make a *quality* stratum-1 ntp server as well?

      -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL         "Less talk.  More synthohol." --Lt. Worf