Bruce,
Your candid explanation is much appreciated. On the other hand,
everybody else got it right and your unit didn't. There is an obvious
remedy here. If your unit implements Autokey, and it does implement just
about everything else, it could run in TAI and deliver the UTC offsets
in an extension field. I would be happy to collaborate on an RFC to that
effect.
Dave
Bruce Penrod wrote:
Apparently a little explanation of how the CDMA mobile phone system
keeps time would be welcome. As most of you are aware, each basestation
in the system must maintain absolute synchronization to GPS time to the
10 us level in order to keep from interfering with the other
basestations. To do this, each has a GPS timing receiver with high
stability oscillator, either quartz or rubidium. This so as to be able
to maintain that level of sync even during hours of holdover after the
antenna has been shot off the tower.
UTC time is not used by the CDMA system for obvious reasons, e.g.
leapseconds. The GPS timescale is strictly monotonic. However, in
order to make the phones show the correct local time, embedded in the
sync channel message which all basestations broadcast continuously, is
the value of the UTC offset to GPS time and the local offset to UTC,
i.e. timezone. However, since these offset values do not affect the
operation of the mobile phone system, great care was not taken to
implement the changeovers rigorously.
Though until now there have been no leap second insertions since we
began shipping our CDMA based products, we have had over the years a
handful of customers report basestations transmitting leap second values
that were off by one second. In response, three years ago we created a
user enterable leap second mode for our CDMA products to allow
overriding the system transmitted value if necessary. This mode also
included the ability to set up the future leap second value prior to the
next insertion so as to be independent of the behavior of the
basestation. This has all been well documented in the product manuals
and a webpage dedicated to leap seconds has been maintained continuously
on our site to show the current and future values of the leap second so
that customers may easily determine how to configure their boxes.
When the IERS Bulletin C arrived in July, we updated our website and
notified via e-mail all CDMA product customers of the impending leap
second, and recommended that all users operate their NTP servers in the
user leap second mode. All NTP servers we shipped after July 1 were
preconfigured to user leap second mode with the current and future leap
seconds set appropriately.
We are pleased to announce that our GPS NTP servers and our CDMA NTP
servers configured in user leap mode performed the leap properly this
afternoon. We are aware that some of the cellular basestations set the
leap second a day early, and some PCS basestations have still not set
it. We regret that some customers apparently had not configured their
NTP servers to operate in user leap second mode, and apologize for any
problems this might have caused.
Unfortunately, judging from the other recent posts, it appears to me
that the long dearth of leap seconds may have resulted in a step
backwards in the proper handling of leap seconds. Many products that
had been debugged back when we were having regular leap second events
have been replaced by new ones that have no experience with them. I'm
not optimistic that we'll ever have a ho-hum leap second event with all
posting to say how smoothly everything went.
If we're lucky, we'll get rid of the pesky things before there's another
one...
Bruce Penrod
EndRun Technologies
_______________________________________________
questions mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.ntp.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
