Gentlemen, I'm building, with help from fellow timenut Richard McCorkle, a distributed cosmic-ray telescope to be run by students (elementary-college). Each of the instruments has a muon detector, a GPS receiver (Navsync CW12-TIM), and a timestamp generator designed by Richard, based on his PICTIC. The instruments upload (to a central SQL database) an ASCII data string consisting of date, time (to seconds), latitude, longitude, altitude, unit ID number, and fractional seconds (nanoseconds). It's called the ERGO Energetic Ray Global Observatory (www.symbiosis-foundation.org/cosmicray.htm). We have about twenty units out in the field now and are aiming to top 100 by the end of 2011.
Here's the rub: when I use Microsoft SQL to convert an ASCII string to "datetime", it does so only to a precision of a few microseconds (at least, that's what it seems like to me). So, when I add in the fractional seconds, the overall precision isn't good enough (it's off by MICROseconds, for crying out loud!). I'm trying for 10-nanosecond precision in the system, so that's just NG. I'm sure the physicists who do real VLBI stuff brew up their own code to handle their data, but we're trying to do it with commercially-available database servers. I figured there might be a timenut out there who happens to know the ins and outs of SQL (there's an odd combination of skills for you), who could help out. Any ideas are appreciated. Tom Bales KE4SYS, oscillating between Miami and Cape Cod _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.