[time-nuts] GPS antenna gain

Tisha Hayes tisha.hayes at gmail.com
Sun Apr 1 23:25:58 EDT 2018


I had the misfortune of using those very PCTEL antennas in a timing
application and excessive gain was a problem with the loss of frame sync
whenever the receiver had too much signal from any satellite. It was a
highly intermittent problem that appeared every few days; always after I
had tested and verified things were working, a failure would happen in the
middle of the night, the day after I flew home.

Of course I had made all of the "terrible choices" of making sure that the
antennas had a clear shot to the sky and coax cable lengths were minimized
to reduce loss. After a few weeks of fighting the issue the solution ended
up being 10 dB attenuators that could pass DC bias.

The WiMAX radio manufacturer initially insisted that I ordered third-party
GPS timing antennas from somewhere and ignored (their not documented)
specification. It got ugly until I provided the invoice showing that I
bought those over-amped up antennas from them, right out of their parts
list.

I still have a few of those antennas floating around here in the house.

*Ms. Tisha Hayes, AA4HA*


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