GPS TIMING

GPS Timing for Electric Utilities
Electric Utilities that use GPS timing can get accuracy on the order of 1 to 10 milliseconds. This also gives them the ability to measure their time in microseconds.

GPS Timing for Financial and Business Applications
Acquiring time for an enterprise using a GPS timing antenna avoids the network opening up Port 123. GPS satellites provide the timing that offers a direct, accurate and secure connection from UTC to inside the security of the organization's network firewall. Timing stamp accuracy inside the timeserver is typically about 1 microsecond to UTC.

Other Reasons to Use GPS Timing
There are also other reasons to use GPS timing besides just performance. GPS timing avoids the need for a dial-up connection, a potential security most IT managers would like to avoid. It also avoids keeping open the networking port (#123), which NTP uses, and is therefore a potential point of entry for an intruder.

How GPS Timing Works
Acquiring UTC from GPS timing requires taking the signal off the air and delivering it to the clients (PCs, workstations, servers, controllers, etc.) that rely on accurate time for event synchronization and time stamping. Since few clients come equipped with reliable network time synchronization software, this means that besides the receiver itself there also has to be a way to distribute time from the receiver to the clients. In other words, the organization needs a time distribution network - typically an architecture of deployed timeservers and time clients.

Why an architecture? Because timeservers acquire time from GPS timing receivers and distribute time in response to client requests. Depending on the size and topology of your network, you may want to install multiple timeservers and do so in a certain configuration:

• To support multiple LANs
• As a backup
• To handle peak load volumes of client requests
• To handle special time-sensitive applications is to make the network self-healing with respect to timekeeping.