Building a Stratum-1 GPS Based NTP Server with a Soekris net4501

Conclusion & Final Thoughts:

The actual hardware assembly time for this project was done over a couple weekend afternoons. The longest part of the assembly was figuring out the serial port signals and making the little LED board, everything else was pretty straight forward.

You might have noticed that I completely skipped over the OS / software. That is another can of worms in itself and requires some technical knowledge of FreeBSD. If there is enough interest from readers I would be more than happy to write an in-depth article with config files and everything on building a NanoBSD image for a net4501 NTP server. If you want to take a stab at it on your own but need some tips or hit a road block, feel free to email me.

So now I have a cool little GPS based NTP server that keeps time (internally) in the nanosecond range. Plug in the power, Ethernet, and GPS antenna in the back and the system is good to go. It's sleek and compact and uses so little power (it's comparable to a night-light) that running it 24x7 has almost no impact on your electric bill.

Not only does this little box keep all the computers on my local network in sync, it is also part of the NTP Pool Project helping thousands of other PCs keep proper time.

The pool.ntp.org project is a big virtual cluster of timeservers striving to provide reliable easy to use NTP service for millions of clients without putting a strain on the big popular timeservers.