[geeks] ntp rant

[Kris Kirby]

On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> I've never seen one so cheaply that anyone serious about time standards
> would ever settle for, but then most of the people I know who are so
> serious are those providing time signals for television or telecom,
> and/or are designing, building, or repairing the equipment to do so.  At
> least not one that's been calibrated and certified!  ;-)

Dad paid $500 for his and got it recalibrated 1 year later for $80. He
used to do microwave work and keeps a 10^8th xtal oven around. He got the
ruby to go to the 9th. He used to have a clock running off of the xtal
oven, we never had to set it except when the batteries went south.

> A television station, or maybe someone running a wide area carrier based
> network, might need a highly stable clock to stay running even when
> everything else goes to pot so that they can sync up with their
> neighbours again when things come together.

$CABLE_COMPANY is using a GPS-based time standard as well. Most folks
consider it good enough, and it fits in 1RU.

> Exactly the point -- which is why I mentioned my colleague's rather
> expensive and fruitless experiments with a GPS-based time source.

Heh. Dad's got five GPS recievers running off of one antenna. Each GPS
puts out a 1PPS and all of them stay in sync with each other. At one
point, he was going to compare the ruby with the GPSs, but never did...

-----
Kris Kirby, KE4AHR          | TGIFreeBSD... 'Nuff said.
<kris at nospam.catonic.net>   | IM: KrisBSD | HSV, AL.
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"Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony."