[LEAPSECS] Reliability (was Re: it's WP7A week in Geneva)

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Sat Oct 3 18:45:14 EDT 2009


In message <0B8B21EB-DBEA-4DEC-89C5-F27557F37495 at noao.edu>, Rob Seaman writes:

>Tom Van Baak wrote:



>It is clearly aberrant design for any system to ever lie about a

>return value.


Well, "lie" is such a strong word.

I know for sure that both the Motorola UT+ and M12+T in certain a
certain specific situation will indicate that it delivers UTC
timestamps but in fact the receiver does not have sufficient
information to adjust from the GPS to the UTC timescale.

The exact circumstances are very specific and related to Almanac
data confusions in conjunction with short interruptions of power.

The timestamps delivered are often, but not always GPS timestamps
in this particular case.

I am not aware if Motorola has fixed this in later firmware revisions.

Poul-Henning

--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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