[time-nuts] Thought experiment on a low cost timing board

[Tom Clark, K3IO (ex W3IWI)]

   I have done several GPSDOs using the NAVMAN receiver, so I add a few
   comments to the discussion:
   1. Both the G3RUH
   ([1]http://www.jrmiller.demon.co.uk/projects/ministd/frqstd.htm) and
   I2PHD ([2]http://gpsdo.i2phd.com/) designs use 74HC390 divider chips;
   I also tried them. What I found was that the 74HC390 dividers had very
   strong temperature sensitivity, amounting to well over 100 nsec with a
   mild diurnal room temperature change. Of course this is due to the
   'HC390s being a cascaded series of ripple counters. To go from 10 MHz
   to 10 kHz, you end up with 12 CMOS stages being cascaded.
   My solution was to replace the 'HC390 change with the elegant
   PIC-based divider chain invented by Tom van Baak. This uses the 10 MHz
   signal as the PIC's clock, and the tight code based on a fixed number
   of wait states makes a fully synchronous divider. I was unable to
   measure ANY temperature effects. The PIC requires less real estate
   than the 'HC390s and is also quite cost effective.
   2. I did a lot of work to optimize the integrator time constants. What
   ended up dominating the stability was the "hanging bridges" that
   result from "zero beats" when the sawtooth error on the timing pulses
   is NOT dithered for several seconds. I ended up with best performance
   with a "lag" analog time constant of ~10 seconds and a "lead" of ~1
   second. This required the use of an op amp in the analog feedback leg
   and high quality polystyrene capacitors in the RC network.
   3. My design was also made more complicated because the long time
   constant led to a very long lock-up time. So I developed a simple
   phase/frequency lock detector that included a "gear shift" between the
   fast and slow time constant states. This made use of the fact that
   TvB's divider could be repeatably reset to acquire approximate time
   lock before the phase steering clicked in.
   4. TvB asked about the properties of the Jupiter-T 10 kHz output.
   Here's what I remember:
     * The 10 kHz output shows the same ±~13 nsec nsec sawtooth "dither"
       because timing pulses are synchronous with the edges of a ~40 MHz
       clock in the GPS receiver. The older ONCORE had ± 52 nsec dither
       because it came from a ~9.5 MHz clock. The newer M12+ is like the
       Jupiter-T with a ~40 MHz clock.
     * The Jupiter-T receiver, when operating in the position hold  (that
       I often call the "Zero-D Timing") mode works quite well. The
       Jupiter-T was made to be a FFF (Form, Fit & Function) replacement
       for the older 8-channel Oncore, and it supports most of the
       Motorola (@@Xy) instructions. It is a 12 channel receiver which
       will use all the satellites it can find. Rick Hambly's TAC-32
       software properly drives the Jupiter-T, and my old TAC-2 board
       will properly mount a Jupiter-T (except that the 10 kPPS output
       needs to be added on the 10-pin header).
     * A major difference from the ONCORE is that the Jupiter-T does NOT
       return the timing error on the next pulse (in the @@Ea message),
       so the dither cannot be removed in software. This is because the
       Jupiter-T achieves its timing output by twiddling the rate of a
       numerically controlled oscillator (NCO) to make the next pulse be
       as correct as possible;  the ONCORE counts the integrated pulses .
       This then results in the Jupiter-T not knowing its constant of
       integration, and hence it is not able to predict the error.

   In short -- The Jupiter-T is a good timing receiver.
   Hope these factoids helped -- Tom

References

   1. http://www.jrmiller.demon.co.uk/projects/ministd/frqstd.htm
   2. http://gpsdo.i2phd.com/