[time-nuts] Synchronisation using GPS

Tom Van Baak tvb at leapsecond.com
Mon Aug 8 11:03:17 EDT 2005


Shaun,

With a short baseline of a few km, this should be
doable. You might want to contact Rick Hambly
of CNS Systems ( http://www.cnssys.com/ ) who
has done a lot of work in this area, including
calibrating GPS receivers at USNO.

Do you need absolute synchronization against
UTC, or just relative synchronization among each
of several sites?

Depending on how quick you need the results,
I think many GPSDO such as Z3801A may not
give you this level of accuracy, either in absolute
or differential mode. But a plain GPS timing
receiver might be able to do it.

I have a similar need this summer and plan to
use sawtooth corrected M12+ GPS receivers
with identical antennas and cable feeds. By
co-locating all the antennas in a one-time trial
experiment you can determine the fixed receiver
offset of each unit, which you then subtract for
all subsequent runs.

The other time-honored approach, of course, is
carry a Cesium clock between the sites. Since
the sites are located within a few minutes of each
other a good cesium will hold 5 ns.

/tvb
http://www.LeapSecond.com


----- Original Message -----
From: "Shaun Doughty" <s.doughty at ee.ucl.ac.uk>
To: <time-nuts at febo.com>
Sent: Monday, August 08, 2005 05:24
Subject: [time-nuts] Synchronisation using GPS


> Hello, I am currently looking at GPS as a possible way of synchronising
> transmission/reception within a radar network.  I was wondering if anyone
> had perhaps previously used GPS to synchronise various locations in this
way
> (mine will likely be a couple of km apart max) and if there were any
> recommended receiver models that might be suitable for this purpose.
>
> Ideally something approaching differential location accuracy of <1m with
> synchronisation error between receiver locations of <5ns would be do-able;
> has anyone ever undertaken anything similar?
>
> Shaun
>







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