[time-nuts] DCF77 & PPS

[folkert]

Hi,

Now that my two servers have a garmin 18x lvc connected to them, their
time keeping is nice.

E.g. this one:

     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
o127.127.20.0    .GPS.            0 l    6   16  377    0.000   -0.006   0.003
[ other clocks skipped for brievety ]

They can be reached from the internet at:
- clock1.trustedtimestamping.com ipv4 & ipv6
- clock2.trustedtimestamping.com ipv6 only  <- I had to restart ntpd on
  that system 10 minutes ago because I confused ntpd by opening the
  serial via which the gps is connected accidently with an other
  program, so it has to settle

Both systems run Linux. Clock1 kernel 3.2 and clock2 runs 2.6.38.

Without ntpd + gps it looses minutes per day (altough when I checked
minutes ago the drift was only 13.637 ppm?!).

I used to also have an MSF receiver but a couple of years the radio
transmitter in England was replaced by a weaker one so I receive mostly
noise now.

Now that it works, it is somewhat boring.
So I got my DCF77 clock from the attic and decided to use it different
then how I'm supposed to use it: as a PPS source! I figured (inspired by
http://remco.org/index.php/2008/06/09/dcf77-pps-experiments-with-a-dcf77-radio-module-using-ntpd/
).
As a quick test I hacked the testdcf.c to show the number of
milliseconds the clock was at when it had received a bit. If I remember
correctly DCF77 sends 60 bits per minute so each bit should be at a
second edge. I expected either a small constant difference or values
that would be over the whole -0.5s ... 0.5s band.
The result was neither! From visual inspection it looked as if only 3 or
4 different offsets were registered. So I ran 3 tests where I took 120
offset-samples, masked of the microseconds and checked how often each
offset occured:

test run 1:
      1 251
     17 255
     38 259
     37 263
     22 267
      5 271

test run 2:
      1 251
     10 255
      1 257
     43 259
      1 261
     44 263
     17 267
      3 271

test run 3:
      2 255
     18 259
     60 263
     32 267
      8 271

Column 1: number of occurences, column 2: the offset.

So my guestimate is that 259 and 263 are the values to look for and I
should ignore the others so that I don't confuse ntpd.

What do you guys think?


(Regarding the 250+ ms offset: the distance of my house to Mainflingen
in Germany (where the DCF77 atomic clock is located) is +/- 374.766km (I
live in Gouda, the Netherlands), so that is an offset of +/- 1.25012s.)


Folkert van Heusden

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