I'm thinking about good reasons to build a GPSDO using something as big and powerful as a 32-bit ARM processor. I think the reason is that you are not really building a GPSDO but some other device that just happens to have a GPSDO inside of it.
For example you want to build a laser range finder and you need to measure time of flight delay. You'd need a very good clock and while you are at it why not discipline the clock with GPS. I could think of some radio experiments where I would want pairs of receivers with their local oscillators running in phase but many miles apart, so I'd build a GPSDO into the radio. The ARM would support running the GPSDO, the bigger application and also remote access over the network or Internet. Today people mostly will build a stand alone GPSDO in a dedicated box and then connect the 10MHZ output to whatever is needed but now as we have seen, you can build a GPSDO completely in software, if your project already has a computer then you can run a GPSDO inside an interrupt handler as a background task. Adding GPSDO functionality to an existing product is almost trivially simple, just $2 in parts and some software if you already have a CPU and OCXO as part of your system. Placing the GPSDO inside the product means the gpsdo can run at a frequency that is more useful and needs no conversion. So you can have the GPS control a 23 Mhz crystal if that is what your laser rangefinder needs. Now that the cost of a GPSDO has fallen to $3 you can build them into "everything". It no longer needs to be a shared device. _______________________________________________ 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.