[time-nuts] Datum Starloc II GPSDO issues

[Mark Sims]

Another big honkin' wart on DATUM's nose:

The unit responds to the standard Trimble TSIP command to select output in UTC or GPS time.  But, and I don't like this big but... I cannot deny,  it always reports that it is in GPS time mode!  You have know way of knowing what kind of time it is actually reporting.   Heavy sigh.   Lady Heather's solution to the pollution is to always run the receiver in GPS mode and convert the time to UTC if the user desires UTC time.   I'd love to give an atomic wedgie to whoever programmed this turkey...

I have also found out that the "request almanac health" message is not the only one that can cause repeated/dropped primary timing packets.  Pretty much any message sent to the receiver can do it.  Lady Heather's solution to out of sequence time messages?  Easy,  sweep 'em under the carpet and pretend they never happened... sorry, but you get no little red ticks in your plot area or log messages showing time sequence hiccups.