[time-nuts] Datum Starloc II GPSDO issues

[Mark Sims]

Recently some Datum Startloc II GPSDO's appeared on Ebay (originally around $50, now $100). The main seller appears to be in Canada. These are a telco type GPSDO that appears to be an attempt at a replacement for Trimble Thunderbolts. I recently got one in and did some playing with it (Lady Heather can now tolerate the beastie). They run on 24V, speak TSIP, use a Motorola 8 channel UT receiver, the RS-232 connector is a male and needs a null modem cable to connect to a computer. Serial protocol is 9600:8N1

Ok, it's wart time:

They do an unstoppable survey when powered on. They say it will be a 14400 sample / 4 hour survey, but (thankfully) it is closer to 30 minutes. It does not appear to save the surveyed position in EEPROM... probably doesn't even have an EEPROM.

It won't let you enter a surveyed position or work in a position hold mode or let you change the receiver mode (2D/3D/position hold, etc). When it enters overdetermined clock mode, the lat and lon data appear fixed but the altitude changes.

The satellite info message reports the signal level, BUT THE AZIMUTH AND ELEVATION FIELDS ARE 0... BASTARDS! No antenna signal level map for you!

It always reports a temperature of 30C.

It does not report actual antenna open/short/OK status. It says everything is always OK... nothing to worry about... move along.

The manufacturing date message reports the month as 0. The hardware and firmware version months are OK.

You can't change the antenna elevation mask angle or signal level mask value or motion filter settings or oscillator disciplining settings or pretty much any fun / useful stuff. The values it sends back for the elevation and signal level masks are random garbage. You can set the cable delay (but loses it when powered off, seems to default to around 150 feet of coax).

It seems to send back requested data whenever it wants (if ever).

There are probably other warts, these are just the few that raised their ugly little heads first.






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[Mark Sims]

I may have mis-spoken on one aspect of these devices... it is now seems to be doing 4-hour power-on surveys... Or perhaps it has some measurement threshold that allows it to end a survey before the full 14,400 samples have been taken. I did a power cycle, went to dinner, and three hours later it was still surveying its malevolent little heart out. It was tracking at least 6 sats with excellent SNR and sat geometry. I wonder why it was previously completing the surveys in 30 minutes?
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[Bob Camp]

Hi

I wonder if these were production line discards rather than pulled from equipment parts? That would explain
the missing manufacturing date. They may still have production test code in them rather than final ship code.

Bob

Post by Mark Sims
Recently some Datum Startloc II GPSDO's appeared on Ebay (originally around $50, now $100). The main seller appears to be in Canada. These are a telco type GPSDO that appears to be an attempt at a replacement for Trimble Thunderbolts. I recently got one in and did some playing with it (Lady Heather can now tolerate the beastie). They run on 24V, speak TSIP, use a Motorola 8 channel UT receiver, the RS-232 connector is a male and needs a null modem cable to connect to a computer. Serial protocol is 9600:8N1
They do an unstoppable survey when powered on. They say it will be a 14400 sample / 4 hour survey, but (thankfully) it is closer to 30 minutes. It does not appear to save the surveyed position in EEPROM... probably doesn't even have an EEPROM.
It won't let you enter a surveyed position or work in a position hold mode or let you change the receiver mode (2D/3D/position hold, etc). When it enters overdetermined clock mode, the lat and lon data appear fixed but the altitude changes.
The satellite info message reports the signal level, BUT THE AZIMUTH AND ELEVATION FIELDS ARE 0... BASTARDS! No antenna signal level map for you!
It always reports a temperature of 30C.
It does not report actual antenna open/short/OK status. It says everything is always OK... nothing to worry about... move along.
The manufacturing date message reports the month as 0. The hardware and firmware version months are OK.
You can't change the antenna elevation mask angle or signal level mask value or motion filter settings or oscillator disciplining settings or pretty much any fun / useful stuff. The values it sends back for the elevation and signal level masks are random garbage. You can set the cable delay (but loses it when powered off, seems to default to around 150 feet of coax).
It seems to send back requested data whenever it wants (if ever).
There are probably other warts, these are just the few that raised their ugly little heads first.
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[Vlad]

Looks like I have similar StarLoc II. But I bough the item from U.S.
Yes, it takes forever to set its location, for some uncertain reason. I
did try to change UT module on it. Even using v4 instead of original v2.
No luck with this. Its behave the same way. Without that position, the
10Mhz output is stable but not correct. As a workaround, every time at
startup, I'll need to put exact precise position of that unit. I am
using TB monitor for this. As its done - its works like I am expecting.

Here is few screenshots from my unit (how its looks like in LH and TBM):

Loading Image...
Loading Image...


And here is compare it with TB

Loading Image...

Post by Bob Camp
Hi
I wonder if these were production line discards rather than pulled
from equipment parts? That would explain
the missing manufacturing date. They may still have production test
code in them rather than final ship code.
Bob

Post by Mark Sims
Recently some Datum Startloc II GPSDO's appeared on Ebay (originally
around $50, now $100). The main seller appears to be in Canada.
These are a telco type GPSDO that appears to be an attempt at a
replacement for Trimble Thunderbolts. I recently got one in and did
some playing with it (Lady Heather can now tolerate the beastie).
They run on 24V, speak TSIP, use a Motorola 8 channel UT receiver,
the RS-232 connector is a male and needs a null modem cable to connect
to a computer. Serial protocol is 9600:8N1
They do an unstoppable survey when powered on. They say it will be a
14400 sample / 4 hour survey, but (thankfully) it is closer to 30
minutes. It does not appear to save the surveyed position in EEPROM...
probably doesn't even have an EEPROM.
It won't let you enter a surveyed position or work in a position hold
mode or let you change the receiver mode (2D/3D/position hold, etc).
When it enters overdetermined clock mode, the lat and lon data appear
fixed but the altitude changes.
The satellite info message reports the signal level, BUT THE AZIMUTH
AND ELEVATION FIELDS ARE 0... BASTARDS! No antenna signal level map
for you!
It always reports a temperature of 30C.
It does not report actual antenna open/short/OK status. It says
everything is always OK... nothing to worry about... move along.
The manufacturing date message reports the month as 0. The hardware
and firmware version months are OK.
You can't change the antenna elevation mask angle or signal level mask
value or motion filter settings or oscillator disciplining settings or
pretty much any fun / useful stuff. The values it sends back for the
elevation and signal level masks are random garbage. You can set the
cable delay (but loses it when powered off, seems to default to around
150 feet of coax).
It seems to send back requested data whenever it wants (if ever).
There are probably other warts, these are just the few that raised
their ugly little heads first.
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[Mark Sims]

I don't think so. The day and year is there, only the month is 0. They guy selling them has them available in sealed factory case lots. They look new. They are in sealed anti-static bags. My guess is they came from somebody's product line closeout.
I did notice that several of their messages make liberal use of fields that Trimble marks "reserved".

-------------------

Post by Bob Camp
I wonder if these were production line discards rather than pulled from equipment parts? That would explain

the missing manufacturing date. They may still have production test code in them rather than final ship code.


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[Mark Sims]

Ok, these things are a little less horrid than they first presented themselves as. Whenever Lady Heather sends a command to change a setting, it follows it up with a command to read that setting back from the receiver. It turns out that the Datum units don't have any (or possible a very small) received message buffer. Basically they were ignoring any commands sent to them. Increasing the delay after sending something to the unit got things working better.
You can't stop a survey using the normal Trimble "stop survey" command, but you can send a fixed position to the unit which will stop the survey. They definitely don't have an EEPROM for saving settings and location between power cycles.
Sending the proper Trimble "set broadcast packet mask" message (that tells it what messages to send automatically) to the unit causes it to stop sending the primary and/or secondary timing messages. I need to figure out a packet mask setting that won't hose up both the Datum or any of the Trimble units...
Also it appears that it occasionally repeats or skips a primary timing message and that causes a "duplicate time stamp" or "missing time stamp" warning if you send the receiver a "request almanac health (0x29) request. The primary timing message should be sent exactly once per second and each message should have sequential and unique time values.


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[Mark Sims]

Another big honkin' wart on DATUM's nose:

The unit responds to the standard Trimble TSIP command to select output in UTC or GPS time. But, and I don't like this big but... I cannot deny, it always reports that it is in GPS time mode! You have know way of knowing what kind of time it is actually reporting. Heavy sigh. Lady Heather's solution to the pollution is to always run the receiver in GPS mode and convert the time to UTC if the user desires UTC time. I'd love to give an atomic wedgie to whoever programmed this turkey...

I have also found out that the "request almanac health" message is not the only one that can cause repeated/dropped primary timing packets. Pretty much any message sent to the receiver can do it. Lady Heather's solution to out of sequence time messages? Easy, sweep 'em under the carpet and pretend they never happened... sorry, but you get no little red ticks in your plot area or log messages showing time sequence hiccups.


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[Ed Palmer]

I don't think so. The day and year is there, only the month is 0. The guy selling them has them available in sealed factory case lots. They look new. They are in sealed anti-static bags. My guess is they came from somebody's product line closeout.
I did notice that several of their messages make liberal use of fields that Trimble marks "reserved".

Was yours in a sealed bag? Looking at the auctions, they're described
as 'New in open bags' or 'may have been opened'. If I was the
suspicious sort (oh wait, I am!) I'd suspect that there was a complete
changeout of all units with fresh ones from the factory - perhaps due to
one or more of the bugs you've found - and the ones being sold are the
bad ones that were replaced and then junked. If there are any that are
sealed, they might be leftover good units. If you look for pictures of
the Starloc II, it's a box with, probably, two boards; this one and a
power converter, similar to the 'retail' version of the Thunderbolt. It
seems odd that a distributor would have a boxful of just this board.

Ed


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[Pete Lancashire]

I'm leaning toward Ed's bet. Having done sub contracting in the past,
when we completed modification work ESD requirements were
that the bags either sealed or closed with a static warning label.

Post by Mark Sims
I don't think so. The day and year is there, only the month is 0. The
guy selling them has them available in sealed factory case lots. They look
new. They are in sealed anti-static bags. My guess is they came from
somebody's product line closeout.
I did notice that several of their messages make liberal use of fields
that Trimble marks "reserved".

Was yours in a sealed bag? Looking at the auctions, they're described as
'New in open bags' or 'may have been opened'. If I was the suspicious sort
(oh wait, I am!) I'd suspect that there was a complete changeout of all
units with fresh ones from the factory - perhaps due to one or more of the
bugs you've found - and the ones being sold are the bad ones that were
replaced and then junked. If there are any that are sealed, they might be
leftover good units. If you look for pictures of the Starloc II, it's a box
with, probably, two boards; this one and a power converter, similar to the
'retail' version of the Thunderbolt. It seems odd that a distributor would
have a boxful of just this board.
Ed
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[Mark Sims]

It appears that they are brand new... no signs of ever being handled or installed. The anti-static bag is sealed with a yellow warning sticker. The date codes in the firmware/software ID message indicates year 2000. The manufacture date message returns 0's in all the fields.

They have a DC-DC converter module soldered to the PCB. The second board in the stack is the Motorola timing receiver. These are OEM boards like the gold boxed Thunderbolts, not the metal boxed "retail" units like the Trimble "red box" Thunderbolts. The connectors are a match to the Trimble units, except the RS-232 connector is a male and requires a null modem cable/adapter.

And for your viewing pleasure, a few more warty warts... a couple of times an hour the UTC offset field reports 0 even though the receiver has a proper UTC offset value.

In the TSIP binary protocol any 0x10 bytes must be sent as 0x10 0x10. The end-of-message flag is 0x10 0x03. If a message contains more than one 0x10 byte, there is a very good chance that the Starloc will send 0x10 0x10 as the end-of-message flag instead of 0x10 0x03! This causes the next message to be merged with the previous one, and it will not be decoded.

The satellite health message (0x59) should have a info type byte followed by 32 bytes of info flags (one for each possible satellite). Our fiends, the intrepid Starloc coders, send an info type byte of 00 (invalid, should be 3 or 6) followed by 31 bytes of 0's.

Ahh, the ephemeris status message (0x5B) should have 16 bytes of data in it. Starloc gives you 15 bytes of zeroes.

The tracked satellite list message (0x6D) has a byte that says how many bytes of satellite ID numbers follow it... good ole' Starloc sends however many bytes if ID's it wants to. The count byte is pretty much useless and if the two don't match, well, the message is bogus.

The satellite solutions message (8F:A7) should have lots of useful info in it like per-satellite clock bias. Well Starloc sends a message with just 13 bytes of who know what... I don't... it ain't nuthin' like what Trimble documents...


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