tengi@princeton.edu (Christopher Tengi) (10/02/90)
I just read a mini-review in the November issue of Radio Electronics magazine about a WWV board for the IBM PC bus. It is the Coordinated Time Link (3442 De La Cruz Blvd., Santa Clara, CA 95054) model CTS-10. This little beastie looks like it might be useful for making fairly inexpensive stratum 1 clocks. Does anyone have any experience with this board or this company? Any good/bad words about the product. I was thinking of taking a spare IBM RT (running AOS) and writing a driver for NTP to talk to th is board. Does this seem reasonable? /Chris ==========----------==========---------+---------==========----------========== UUCP: ...princeton!tengi VOICEnet: 609-258-6799 INTERNET: tengi@princeton.edu FAX: 609-258-3943 BITNET: TENGI@PUCC
clements@bbn.com (Bob Clements) (10/03/90)
In article <2994@idunno.Princeton.EDU> tengi@princeton.edu (Christopher Tengi) writes: [A very long line with no carriage returns, which translates into:] > I just read a mini-review in the November issue of Radio > Electronics magazine about a WWV board for the IBM PC bus. It is > the Coordinated Time Link (3442 De La Cruz Blvd., Santa Clara, CA > 95054) model CTS-10. This little beastie looks like it might > be useful for making fairly inexpensive stratum 1 clocks. Does > anyone have any experience with this board or this company? Any > good/bad words about the product. I was thinking of taking a > spare IBM RT (running AOS) and writing a driver for NTP to talk > to this board. Does this seem reasonable? I sent a message much like yours a year ago when this board was first announced. I ordered (and pre-paid for) a board. A VERY long time went by. After a fair number of phone calls (at my expense), and a fair number of varying excuses from them, I concluded they were going belly-up. Eventually someone on this list reported that they had seen one of these boards for sale in a store. So I called them and asked if they could maybe send me the board I had paid for. They sent me a board which turned out to have a broken receiver section. The next board they sent me actually sort of worked. It can hear the WWV signal for at least two hours out of 24 (in Massachusettts). It listens ONLY to the 100 Hz subcarrier, not the 1000/1200 Hz tones. It is certainly not in the "Stratum 1" category. It is somewhat worse than the Heathkit clock, since it listens only to one frequency (10 MHz) and one audio tone (100 Hz). I haven't got the luxury of a good oscillator and/or a chart recorder or other comparator at home, so I can't comment on micro-bobbles and the like. It's probably OK for timestamping your Lotus 1-2-3 files, though. > /Chris > UUCP: ...princeton!tengi VOICEnet: 609-258-6799 > INTERNET: tengi@princeton.edu FAX: 609-258-3943 > BITNET: TENGI@PUCC Bob Clements, K1BC, clements@bbn.com