[time-nuts] New Member / Z3801

[Artek Manuals]

Hi guys

Dave at ArtekManuals.com here. Long time electronics 
enthusiast/tinkerer/ ham radio op.
Recently moved and am in the process of setting up my long dreamed of a 
planned electronics lab and radio shack (NR1DX).

At the heart of the lab is a HP Z3801 GPSDO to provide  an external 
10MHz frequency reference. I bought the unit about 15 years ago but it 
has been in environmentally controlled storage ever since. Serial prefix 
is 3517Axxxxx and I am running this on a +54VDC supply. Upon firing the 
Z3801 up, the first conundrum I am running into is that the unit does 
not seem to support setting the date above 12/31/2007. Sometimes during 
the survey mode it will automatically set the correct 2016 date , other 
times during the survey the date stays stuck on 1996. The unit tracks 
the satellites and mostly settles in around 1 second PPS at +/- 20ns 
with a holdover of 4 to 8us. More about the "mostly" comment in a later 
post.

On the surface the actual reported date is not a big deal for me. as 
long as the date is not critical to the GPSDO function? The engineer in 
me would like to be able to set the date correctly ......just because. 
When attempting to set the using GPS:INIT:DATE I get an E-222 error 
(data out of range).

So here are my initial questions.
1) I assume that the date thing is a firmware issue? Is there updated 
firmware out there that allows dates above 2007, 12, 31?
2) If all I care about is 10MHz accuracy, do I need to care about the date?
3) Is there a different command string I should be using?
4)Software: I am running HP SATSTAT and Z38XX on a WIN-XP/32 laptop 
...IS there something better (or different) I should be running in the 
way of FREE software? I looked at the GPSCon package and so far 
questions about support for the software and portability eventually to 
WIN-10 supported have gone unanswered (not a good sign)

Finally I am sure that the above have been addressed on older posts, but 
I gave up searching in frustration.  Is there an easy way to search the 
ENTIRE list archive. It seems that the archives must be queried one 
month at time which is REALLY TEDIOUS

Dave
NR1DX
ArtekManuals.com

-- 
Dave
Manuals at ArtekManuals.com
www.ArtekManuals.com


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