Capabilities
GPS holdover
Maintaining timing accuracy through extended loss of GPS.
What it is
Holdover is what a system does after the reference disappears. Every timing architecture has an answer to it, and for most of them the answer is a crystal oscillator that starts drifting immediately and crosses the tolerance line within hours. The length of the outage a site can absorb is set entirely by how good that local reference is.
An atomic reference changes the shape of that curve rather than the slope of one oscillator. The interesting problem is making one that is small enough and cheap enough to sit in ordinary equipment, and qualifying it so that the holdover figure quoted is the one every unit actually delivers.
Example applications
- Defense
- Platforms and ground equipment continue to operate on a shared timebase through a denial event, instead of degrading from the moment the signal is lost.
- Data centers
- Distributed storage, transaction ordering and observability all rest on bounded clock error. Atomic clock holdover for data centers keeps that bound intact while the antenna sees nothing.
Talk to us about GPS holdover
Tell us how long an outage you have to absorb, what your current reference is, and what breaks first when it drifts.