[time-nuts] Symmetricom NTS-150 Network Time Server Report

[Ben Hall]

Afternoon all,

The NTS-150 arrived today from the e-place.  Made a null-modem cable, fired it up, and eventually the LED went flashing green indicating GPS lock.  However...it thinks it's the year 2001...a clear indication of the GPS rollover issue.

Some googling indicates that while a firmware upgrade exists, it doesn't fix the roll-over issue.

I quickly scanned the circuitry - its a got a Zarlink Semiconductor GPS front end chip and separate GPS correlator, plus what seems to be a dedicated ARM microprocessor.

At the moment, it's not clear to me how much of the NTP functions are in the ARM micro or in the other chips on-board...and if there is a TTL-serial link of known format (say NMEA) that I could cut say between the ARM micro and the rest of the NTP functionality to shotgun in a uBlox or other GPS module.

Looks like there was a thread on the eevblog webpage where someone was trying to do that but seems that they didn't get anywhere...

So basically, I've got a nice rack-mount enclosure to enclose my next rack-mount project...as I don't think it will ever work as an NTP server again.  :)

Thanks much and 73,
ben, kd5byb