[Lowfer] Results of overnight BPSK session

[Bill de Carle]

Monitored Lyle's GPS-disciplined BPSK transmission last night until
just after sunrise this morning.  Results were pretty much as expected,
about 90 percent good copy throughout the night using a GRAB depth of 5.

Copy was only lost on two occasions, one of which coincided with some very
heavy audible QRM at the Rx end.  The other occasion was shortly thereafter
but after I had gone to bed so I don't know what happened.

This is the first time (to my knowledge) we have successfully used
GPS-disciplined timing at each end to achieve both bit-sync and
frame-sync with C-BPSK.  It works like a charm!  Kudos to Lyle for
getting everything set up to start transmitting GPS-disciplined
C-BPSK in record time and re-inspiring me.  I went out to the woods
in last night's cold and snow and darkness to re-tune my loop by
flashlight.  Lots of fun!

One of the drawbacks to C-BPSK in the past was that it took a long
time to get sync'd in, especially at slower bit rates such as MS1000.
Well, that's all water under the bridge now.  With the newest version
of AFRICAM and GPS inputs to the program at Tx, Rx ends, establishing
bit and frame sync is a piece of cake and the system stays in lock solidly
throughout the monitoring session.  That removes an important impediment
and lets us get the best possible message decoding performance.

There is lots of room for improvement.  I'm still running an old Garmin G25
GPS receiver at the Rx end.  That's a serial channel unit without
position-hold
capability.  So it has to see (at least) 3 satellites all the time to
avoid drop-out.  Last night there were several GPS timing drop-outs due
to poor satellite coverage.  That would have cost us some performance.
And my outside GPS antenna is flat on the roof where it is covered up
by about a foot of packed snow, so it's pretty awesome the thing even
worked at all.  I'll get up there today and try to remove some of that
snow.

I did obtain two of those ONCORE modules that were on sale cheap a few
months ago.  Unfortunately they come in two versions, the GT (automotive)
version and the UT (timing) version.  As luck would have it, I got the
GT version.  It doesn't have the "position hold" feature.  These ONCORE
units look like better units for our timing purposes because they have
an 8-channel parallel receiver.  The UT version promises to have fewer
dropouts and boasts 1-pps output with +/- 50 nsec accuracy.

Question for the experts:

I'm guessing the Oncore GT and Oncore UT boards are identical hardware-wise,
differing only in the firmware programmed into their flash ROM.  Does
anyone on this reflector know if it is possible to re-flash an Oncore GT
to convert it into an Oncore UT?  And how to do it? And where to get the
UT firmware?  The flash ROM chip on the board is a TN28F010 (120), Intel
I think.  Any suggestions?

Bill VE2IQ