>> But aren't we losing sight of what Jinx wants to do?
>
>The conversation has wandered a little but I'm still
>in the market for a solution.


>> 2 - Pick up your local radio time standard transmission
>
>I'm waiting for an answer from RadioNZ on that one

I would have thought that you could have a "crystal set" (well, I appreciate
it really would need to be more than that) tuned to 2YA (511kHz ??) and use
an NE567 or similar to pick out the time codes. My understanding is that
they are 4 cycles on 1kHz each second for the 5 seconds before the hour, and
6 cycles on the hour, but I could well be wrong on the number of cycles.


>> 3 - Use a GPS that puts out a time signal

(changed the order of Jinx's mail here)
> http://www.gpsclock.com/specs.html
>
>"It is not like the radio 'atomic' clocks that are
>accurate to half a second or so" - true or ad spin ?


This sounds like a commercial version of Brooks Shera's time standard at
http://www.rt66.com/~shera/ which claims to lock a crystal to very high
accuracy.

>I've an on-going project that may involve GPS. If so,
>that would be a convenient solution at that time. If
>not, I'm not sure I'd want to buy anything that will
>get used just once. Although I could tlook around for
>one to borrow. But I've been doing a little surfing

I am looking to build Brooks project (one day) and have an ordinary 10MHz AT
cut crystal that I intend to oven in a thermos flask. It has one of the
turnover points pretty well smack on 40C.

> http://tufi.alphalink.com.au/time/time_gps.html
>
>One of the links includes the following warning -
>
>"It has been reported by users in the USA, New Zealand
>and Australia that the LCD time display on most, if not
>all, handheld GPS receivers can be late by as much as
>1 or 2 seconds.  This can be readily shown by comparing
>the LCD display on a handheld GPS receiver with a source
>of known accurate time, such as WWV, telephone or true GPS time"
>
>For the moment I'll just see what's available free. As MRL
>promote their standards as being for exactly what I'm trying
>to do, I've asked them for more information

I believe the serial data time transmission can be quite inaccurate, which
is one of the reasons why a 1PPS pulse is available on OEM receivers. Maybe
you could try and hit up Rakon for one of those thumbnail sized GPS units I
saw reported recently
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&ObjectID=10363046

I guess what you want is an NZ wide version of the Rugby transmitter at
60kHz ;))

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