alt Hacker NewsIt sounds like GPS, and thus a GPS-based stratum 1 server, uses these time servers, but they were successfully failed over:
> Jeff finished off the email mentioning the US GPS system failed over successfully to the WWV-Ft. Collins campus. So again, for almost everyone, there was zero issue, and the redundancy designed into the system worked like it's supposed to.
So failures in these systems are potentially correlated.
The author mentions another solution. Apparently he runs his own atomic clock. I didn’t know this was a thing an individual could do.
> But even with multiple time sources, some places need more. I have two Rubidium atomic clocks in my studio, including the one inside a fancy GPS Disciplined Oscillator (GPSDO). That's good for holdover. Even if someone were jamming my signal, or my GPS antenna broke, I could keep my time accurate to nanoseconds for a while, and milliseconds for months. That'd be good enough for me.
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Atomic clocks cover a pretty big range of performance nowadays. You can pick up a used but serviceable rubidium frequency reference for a few hundred dollars but the difference between it and the top of the line clocks is almost as big as the difference between a it and a good pendulum clock.
The CSACs that I have in a couple devices are 'atomic', and use Rubidium, but they're a bit lower accuracy than Cesium clocks [1] or Hydrogen Masers [2].
There are a few folks on the time-nuts mailing list who own such exotic pieces of hardware, but those are pretty far out of reach for most!
[1] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/co...
[2] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/co...