Fixing up my MSF radio clock

One of the first hardware things I did with a Raspberry Pi (sometime around March 2013) was interface it to a cheap 60kHz radio clock board, and write some driver software to interface it to ntpd. That was in one house, then in another, and then got dismantled, put in a box, and smashed up a bit. Based on the

I spent a few hours yesterday fixing it up: resoldering the antenna onto the circuit board, getting rid of the dodgy soldering and putting it on a prototype board, putting a capacitor across the power supply because I heard rumour that might make it receive better (it doesn't seem to), and implementing parity checking in the decoder.

It's still terribly awkward to position: I have it velcroed up on top of a curtain rail to try to get it high and away from all my other electronics and it is still very sensitive to antenna positioning; and it is still estimated by ntpd to be less accurate than getting time off the internet; and even with parity checking it is still fairly common for it to decode a time that is wrong.

But it has a nice flashing red LED.

Software: https://github.com/benclifford/msf

sdr

I got a NooElec R820T Software Defined Radio.

Only got a kernel stack trace once, trying to unload the automatically loaded digital TV drivers. And I didn't have to compile anything.

About half an hour after unboxing, I was using gqrx to get a waterfall plot of various things - BBC Radio 1, Capital, PMR446, the London bus trunked radio system, GB3LW, some local business users, and some (not-decoded) ADS-B plane traffic and some classical music being played in the CB range.

I think it needs a better antenna though - I can pick up stuff ok on my Baofeng handheld that I'm not getting through this.

Also might be interesting to see if a Raspberry Pi 2 is powerful enough to run this.

27 o'clock

In Japan, I was surprised to see Osaka FM802 Funky Music Station listing their times in 24h notation all the way up to around 2759... turns out in radio (even apparently in the rest of the world), the day changes at 4am, so the clock runs from 0400 to 2800-δ.