What are you connecting it to? The computer hardware & OS are just as important. Will your antenna have an unobstructed view of the sky?
IMHO buying from major players like Garmin would be better. More compacted in size (can be attached to window easily) and does not need separate DC power line.
sure, the antenna would be on the roof, good to go… it would be connected to a reasonably powerful windows 10 system… I have used linux before, but I really dont want to screw around with that, everything I always wanted to do with linux proved to always be more difficult and provided a steeper learning curve.
This device is Cheap, so I was trying to take that into consideration too, but HOW will I interface it to an NTP time server is the biggest question, which is why I may simply go for this thing for $299 Instead:
Yes this is just a “kicking around” of ideas… obviously more expensive (although significantly cheaper than many other +$1000 solutions out there), but more likely to end in a successful project.
There are Windows builds of NTP out there, I think Meinberg is probably the most popular:
https://www.meinbergglobal.com/english/sw/ntp.htm
However, I have no idea how to setup a PPS input on Windows, or if the Meinberg distribution has the correct GPS refclocks compiled in. I’m sure some googling would yield some how-to guides.
For my GPS based NTP servers I prefer FreeBSD… But it can be done on Linux usually by using GPSD.
Funny, yes…thats exactly what I’m using and then through their program I poll a couple of strat 1 servers near me (relatively near) at Columbia U… I’m not sure if I "need " to use a meinberg GPS hardware product to be able to interface with this software or not, thats something I will need to ask them…also I see that going in through a serial port rs232/db9 is usually preferred over USB even when using a rs232 to USB converter due mainly to wildly unpredictable offsets in data transmission, so luckily there is a header for that on my motherboard to break out from and apparently unbeknownst to me a lot of boards have this!
I found out garmin makes 3 types of that model and the only one with PPS is this on 18xLVC
The TM1000A is only rated for 350 NTP requests per second. If you can afford a little bit more, the LeoNTP can do more than 100,000 in real world conditions.
+1 for the LeoNTP, we run one in a commercial datacentre for this reason: http://www.leobodnar.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=272
I was thinking about a Rasberry Pi too… The 3 B+ is only $35, plus you would need a GPS module but those aren’t that much more. I think I read 4W power consumption? Quad-Core 1.4GHz w/ 1GB RAM… Seems more than powerful enough for a pool NTP server.
The Soekris Net4501 that I built several NTP servers from is only a 133MHz single-core 486-class CPU with 64MB of RAM and it does just fine.