et-102 "usefulness" with NTP

Hi Folks–I’ve tried running the et-102 with NTP (network

time protocol) with pretty dismal performance in NMEA

mode. I used the gpsd code’s sirfmon utility to check

out the functionality of the et-102 with my unix PC’s

(I built a MAX232 to buffer the TTL with RS-232 levels).

The sirfmon is excellent, by the way–it shows the

et-102 grabbing SBAS style DGPS off a geostationary

satellite here in California.

Anyways, setting up only the $GPGGA sentence and

running ntp shows that the NMEA code out of the

et-102 will flap back and forth a whole second.

Ouch…

Utterly unusable with ntp. If it were entirely one second off,

consistently, that could be “fudged” in ntp. But, the

NMEA sentence just wanders back and forth, making

it basically unusable. On the other hand, the PPS output

is very useable. I set up the ATOM driver in ntp and

made a host with a Garmin GPS35/ntp the “prefer” host

and when ntp got sync, the ATOM kicked in and the

pps shows within single digits of microsecond, on par with

the gps35’s PPS output in ntp.

I also tried setting the $GPRMC sentence with no

improvement. The NMEA mode just bites mouldy

burritos. Unless… Is there a firmware update available

for this thing? The ones I have show:

2.3.2-GSW2-2.05.024-C1Prod1.1

//rtxo//