[time-nuts] Last Call Group Buy Ublox LEA-6T

[Bob Camp]

Hi

Well, the first step is to talk to the outfits about you weekly usage rate of the 
chip sets. In some cases anything under 10K chips a day simply isn’t interesting to 
them. After that you sign their NDA and they sign your NDA. After both of the
lawyer teams are happy that the right signatures are in the right places, you 
get access to the basic info. From there you go back and forth a bit about what
can or can’t be done. 

Next step is to get a spec on an actual chip set and the design data for it. You then
are off to source this and that odd part needed to complete the design. After that you
do a board layout. Almost inevitably that’s an HDI board. Spend $5K or more on the first
panel of boards and wait 30 to 60 days to get them (in one case it was 90 days, they goofed
twice in a row). 

Boards come in. Send them off to pick and place for assembly.  Then you find out what 
you did or didn’t miss in the spec and if your choice of odd parts to complete the design 
actually work or not. Figure on a re-spin of the board as a real possibility. 

Assuming it passes a basic smoke test, off to see how it does as a timing receiver. Maybe
it works. Maybe there are bugs. Maybe the bugs can be fixed …. maybe they can’t. Likely
that part is a few months at least before all the emails are sorted out and there is a decision. 

Off to the next vendor and the same process on their chip set … then the next one ….
then the next one …. then the next one.  Same process every time. Same NDA’s same
gag order as a result. Ultimately you can get a part that will give you about +/- 1 ns 
without sawtooth correction and who knows how much better with sawtooth. Since the 
sawtooth is part of the NDA stuff, I can’t even tell you who that is… Here I’m simply
talking about resolution and the range of the un-corrected pulse. 

Bob



> On May 19, 2016, at 4:21 PM, David <davidwhess at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 19 May 2016 15:30:05 -0400, you wrote:
> 
>> ...
>> 
>>> You can see this phenomena with the LEA modules quite clearly: 
>>> The LEA-4, -5, -6, -7 and -8 modules all use an internal 48MHz clock. 
>>> Even though there were 2 complete overhauls of the system in this ~13 year
>>> timespan.
>> 
>> Which is why a lot of outfits have abandoned uBlox and moved on to other
>> outfits that didn’t stall out.
>> 
>> Bob
> 
> Could you give some examples?  I have been reviewing the uBlox and
> other modules for my own project but maybe there are better options
> that I have missed.
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