GPSD 3.10 is shipped &#8211; and announcing the GPSD Time Service HOWTO
<p>Blogging has been light recently because I&#8217;ve been working very hard on a major <a href="http://www.catb.org/gpsd/">GPSD</a> release, which I just shipped. This is mostly new features, not bugfixes, and it&#8217;s probably the most new code we&#8217;ve shipped in one release since about 2009.</p>
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<p>The most user-visible feature of 3.10 is that 1PPS events are now visible in gpsmon &#8211; if you have a GPS that delivers this signal you can fire it up and watch how your system clock drifts in real time against the GPS top of second. Also you&#8217;ll see visible indicators of PPS in the packet logging window at the start of each reporting cycle.</p>
<p>For those of you using GPSD with marine AIS radios, the Inland AIS system used on the Thames and Danube receivers is now fully decoded.  We&#8217;ve also added support for the aid-to-navigation messages used in English and Irish coastal waters. There&#8217;s a new AIS data relay utility, gps2udp, that makes it easy to use GPSD to feed AIS aggregation sites like AISHub. AIS report control has been cleaned up, with text dumping of controlled-vocabulary fields no longer conditional on the &#8220;scaled&#8221; flag (that was dumb!) but done unconditionally in new JSON attributes paired with the numeric ones.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s alpha-stage RTCM3 decoding; I expect this to become more fully baked in future releases.  No ADSB yet, alas &#8211; we&#8217;ve had people express interest but nobody is actually coding.</p>
<p>The usual bug fixes, too. Use of remote data sources over TCP/IP is much more reliable than it was in 3.9; more generally, the daemon is less vulnerable to incorrectly dropping packets when write boundaries from an I/O source land in the middle of packets.  Mode and speed changes to u-blox devices now work reliably; there had been a race condition after device startup that made them flaky.</p>
<p>The most significant changes, though, are in features related to time service. GPSD, which is used by quite a few Stratum 1 network time servers, now feeds ntpd at nanosecond rather than microsecond resolution. The PPS drift report that is part of gpsd&#8217;s JSON report stream if your GPS emits 1PPS is now nanosecond-resolution as well.</p>
<p>And, after weeks of effort, we&#8217;ve shipped along with 3.10 the first edition of the <a href="http://www.catb.org/gpsd/gpsd-time-service-howto.html">GPSD Time Service HOWTO</a>. This document explains in practical detail how to use GPSD and a 1PPS-capable GPS to set up your own Stratum 1 time server.</p>
<p>This might not seem like a big deal, but the HOWTO is actually the first explanation accessible to ordinary mortals of a good deal of what was previously black magic known only to a handful of metrologists, NTP maintainers, and time-nut hobbyists. What happened was that I cornered several domain experts and beat them mercilessly until they confessed. :-)</p>
<p>Now I&#8217;m gonna go catch up on my sleep&#8230;</p>
