[time-nuts] Symmetricom TruTime XL-DC date error

Russell Rezaian rrezaian at motorola.com
Thu May 12 18:07:43 UTC 2011


Hi Pete,

I have a few of these boxes with various different firmware versions.

Some of the older boxes do have known issues with GPS week rollover 
and I have seen things labeled on these boxes as Y2K fixes too.

For your particular box there is one setting I think MIGHT make a 
difference for you.

Keypad function 68, or serial function F68 called "Year Entry" is 
intended for GPS epoch management.

The interesting thing is that depending on you firmware version how 
you set that parameter can have some unusual effects.  On some 
machins you need to set it to an incorrect number to force the epoch 
calculations to work.

For most of my systems with new firmware setting the number correctly 
works properly as expected.

For the NTS-100 systems, which are derived from the XL-DC, you 
sometimes need to set the year to 1996 to get the correct year out of 
the clock.  I believe this is also true for some XL-DC firmware 
versions.

On the serial port try typing "F68" and sending a CR.  It should 
reply with the current setting.

To set it, send "F68" a space, and then the year, followed by a CR. 
Example "F68 2011" followed by CR.

Try checking how this is set now.  If it shows the correct year, try 
setting it back to 1996.

If neither of those work, you may be able to find an alternate value 
that convinces the system to give you the correct value.

You should still be able to find the manual and GPS rollover 
bulletins for these on the net.  If not, copies can probably be found 
in peoples archives.
--
Russell


At 10:46 AM -0700 2011/05/12, Peter Loron wrote:
>Hello, group. I've got a Symmetricom TruTime XL-DC, which appears to 
>be working ok now that I have the proper antenna. However, it thinks 
>the date is 2031.
>
>Is this a known firmware issue for these boxes?
>
>Thanks.
>
>-Pete
>
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