[time-nuts] Ebay LEA-6T hockey pucks

[Mark Sims]

I got in one of those LEA-6T hockey puck gizmos from China off of Ebay ($30,  OK, I paid $40 to get it quicker (3 days) from a US seller).   It seems to work fine.  I connected it to one of my RS-232 level converter boards by hacking off one of the hockey puck cable connectors and wiring it directly to my level converter board.  The pucks can speak over USB or serial (default is 9600:8N1).   It has a regulator for dropping USB 5V down to 3.3V,  but works fine with 3.3V in.  There is a nice teardown and discussion about these on EEVBLOG:

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/ebay-u-blox-lea-6t-gps-module-teardown-and-initial-test/

These are probably the cheapest and easiest way to get an LEA-6T,  but you would probably want to cobble on an external antenna connector. The timepulse signals are not brought out to the cables, but is easy to add.  There is a LED/transistor on PPS1 but you would probably want to change or remove that.  PPS1 is connected directly to the base of the transistor so PPS1 gets clipped to a low level.