[time-nuts] Re: CF cards and the Trimble NetRS

[Bob kb8tq]

Hi

More NetRS trivia:

One of the features of the NetRS is that it will act as an NTP server. 
It’s not the most modern device so I very much would not want to 
serve a ton of clients off of one. It also has been a *long* time since
the OS was patched. If you are looking for “modern” features or 
security patches, maybe not the best thing to use. It certainly isn’t 
going to compete with the Leo Bodnar NTP in terms of size or 
power consumption. You won’t get a steady stream of updates and
patches like you would on something cool from Meinberg.

That said, for a “shop for a while” sub $150 sort of price, they would
be a reasonable deal. Not many packaged NTP products on eBay 
that you “just plug in” and that run multi-band GPS. You would get
the frequency monitoring and RTK base station stuff “for free”. 

Can you / could you / might you upgrade the OS? Since there really
isn’t much info on what the hardware looks like, that could be 
exciting. The cards are “locked down” (though not encrypted) as 
received so even poking around to try this or that isn’t trivial. How 
much was done (if anything) to keep the OS “out of the way” of the 
GPS code …. who knows ….

Fun !!

Bob



> On Mar 21, 2022, at 1:01 PM, John Ackermann N8UR <jra at febo.com> wrote:
> 
> You can stream data out of the receiver via either TCP or serial port without storing to disk, so that's probably the best bet to save CF wear and tear.  I'm not sure if it's more difficult to turn the
> 
> But for now I'm doing as you suggest -- I have one "T00" format session logging to disk in 24 hour files, with the "autodelete" function turned on to delete oldest files first when the disk gets nearly full.
> 
> However, I've been collecting data now for almost 4 months, and have used 68.5 MB, with 770 MB still available, so I won't need to delete anything for quite a long while.
> 
> John
> ----
> 
> On 3/21/22 11:22, Skip Withrow wrote:
>> Hello Time-Nuts,
>> Seems like there has been a lot of interest in the NetRS lately
>> because of their availability at reasonable prices (sometimes).
>> They use a Compact Flash card to store the operating system and logged
>> data files.  I'm not very knowledgeable about Linux, but I would guess
>> that there is no wear leveling implemented in this receiver.
>> So, when considering how best to use the data logging area it would
>> seem that instead of collecting some data, downloading it, deleting
>> file(s), and repeating the best strategy would be to collect data and
>> let the data logging area fill up before deleting (the files could be
>> read anytime).
>> This would minimize the number of writes to any one area of the CF
>> card I believe (except perhaps the directory structure).
>> However, even if you were deleting data often, you still may not be
>> able to get to the life of the CF card.  The good news is that even if
>> a card does go bad you can reconstruct a new one from the image of
>> version 1.3-2 of the software that is floating around.  I have tried
>> it and it works.
>> If there is better insight into the operation of this receiver, or
>> best practices strategy I'm all ears.
>> Regards,
>> Skip Withrow
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