The GPS ticks! / 2020-07-03

I remembered the junkbox contains an active GPS antenna which I bought together with the gpskit gps unit in 2003(!). And some other bits and pieces included a SMA to BNC adapter so I put the little GPS antenna outside and connected it to the GPS/RTC Hat.

Before I was back behind a computer it was showing a location and within a few minutes it had a PPS pulse. I was used to cold start taking at least 15 minutes with the gpskit!

So I tested with ntpd talking to gpsd via shared memory. This gave an interesting offset between local gps time and a nearby ntp server.

$ ntpq -p
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
*SHM(2)          .PPS.            0 l    6   64  377    0.000   -0.149   1.672
xSHM(0)          .GPS.            0 l    5   64  377    0.000  -104.51   1.943
+ntpritchie.idef 131.211.8.244    3 u  101   64  376    2.774    0.950  13.948
+metronoom.dmz.c 131.211.8.252    2 u   99   64  376   10.482   -0.844  10.638
$ ntpdc -c kern
pll offset:           -0.000136461 s
pll frequency:        -11.054 ppm
maximum error:        1.3748e-05 s
estimated error:      1.7071e-05 s
status:               2001  pll nano
pll time constant:    6
precision:            1e-09 s
frequency tolerance:  500 ppm

I'm not too happy about the fact that the GPS NMEA messages are seen as wrong, so I'm going to stop using gpsd and go for a setup optimized for timing.