This short-form summarises Chronos’ capabilities in 24×7 monitoring and OEM GNSS solution delivery. Chronos is recognised globally for its knowledge and competencies in these fields with specific expertise in timing, synchronisation and geolocation technologies.

Customers in the telecommunications, defence/security, energy and enterprise sectors have all benefited by their long and continuing relationship with Chronos, in particular, the skills and technological building blocks developed in-house. These allow monitoring of internal systems and external dependencies which in turn have brought improved system uptime, reduced system failure and greater reliability for mission critical applications.

Chronos in-house capabilities include:

• 24×7 System Monitoring Techniques
• Timing Anomaly Detection
• GPS/GNSS Jamming, Interference and Multipath Detection and QoS Monitoring
• eLoran Timing and Signal Quality Monitoring
• Visualisation, Data Analysis and Communications
• GPS/GNSS Disciplined Oscillator & CSAC Design

This capability sheet provides an overview of essential technological building blocks which are available for commercialisation and exploitation by embedding into customers’ equipment and solutions as either discrete products, OEM modules and PCB blades or IP components.

24/7 System Monitoring Techniques

The Chronos 24×7 monitoring capability is optimised to detect non-deterministic and occasional anomalous behaviour for timing, synchronisation and GNSS applications. Non-deterministic events are often the cause of system instability and failure and are typically expensive and time consuming to trace and mitigate. Chronos’ monitoring technology ensures the capture and analysis of rare events by delivering data around the anomaly to create actionable situational awareness in order to mitigate and/or rectify the problem. Events are filtered and non-relevant data discarded. Alerts are activated when an event is detected.

Whilst we have focused on timing and GNSS, you may wish to bring other 24×7 monitoring opportunities to our attention.

Timing Anomaly Detection

Timing anomaly detection features include 24×7 MTIE threshold detection for frequencies from 64kHz to 200MHz including standard telecom E1 and T1 monitoring. 1pps + UTC Time of Day (ToD) monitoring. Optical and electrical SyncE frequency and Ethernet Synchronous Message Channel (ESMC) Monitoring. PTP monitoring offering true one-way packet delay measurement capability and PTP GrandMaster & Slave clock performance assessment up to Gigabit Ethernet.

GPS/GNSS Jamming, Interference and Multipath detection

Chronos has set the pace in the emerging Interference, Detection and Mitigation (IDM) area through its leadership of the GAARDIAN and SENTINEL collaborative research projects*. The capabilities include jamming, interference and multipath detection, examination of anomalous behaviour with GPS/GNSS signals through 24×7 monitoring of critical parameters such as signal-to-noise ratio, spectral power density and fused with in-house QoS metric analysis. Currently focussed at the GPS L1 signal-in-space, extension to additional frequencies and systems such as Galileo or Glonass is possible.

eLoran Timing and Signal Quality Monitoring

eLoran Low Frequency (LF) transmissions are widely recognised as an alternate Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) technology. Technically dissimilar to space based PNT systems such as GPS or the future GALILEO service, they are not susceptible to the same jamming and interference activity. Chronos has a long heritage of eLoran technology involvement and has timing solutions and in-house 24×7 QoS monitoring for the LF signal reception and decoding. Monitoring of multiple transmitter stations is possible as is the delivery of highly stable UTC traceable timing signals derived from the eLoran transmissions themselves and meeting the ITU G.811 MTIE standard. Capabilities also include automatic Additional Secondary Factor (ASF) calibration to align the eLoran 1pps time pulse to UTC.

Visualization, Data Analysis and Communications

The Chronos 24×7 remote monitoring solutions above can be complemented by a local craft terminal graphical user interface (GUI) or web based GUI on a server. Events are stored on the central server database using GSM or WAN/VPN communications from the sensors. Access to the server is via a secure browser based log-in and data can be viewed, analysed, shared and copied for reports. Monitoring parameters and sensor configuration can be easily managed on-line. Multiple sensor networks can be configured, managed and enabled through one server with selectable viewer access rights.

GPS/GNSS Disciplined Oscillator & CSAC Design

Using the latest high sensitivity assisted GPS and software radio technology, Chronos is able to offer bespoke designs which can utilize small footprint TCXO, OCXO, Rubidium and Chip Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC) technology. In-house design services include phase locked loop (PLL) and holdover optimization. Also ideal for form, fit and function retrofit GPS designs to replace discontinued and obsolete OEM solutions.

These solutions have resulted in the smallest footprint, lowest power GPS disciplined Chip Scale Atomic Clock GPSDC™ to emerge onto the market since the commercialization of CSAC technology.

Core skills include:

• Multilayer RF and Logic PCB Design
• System Architecture Design and Integration
• FPGA, CPLD & ARM Development
• Linux Platform Software Development
• Communications, Database, GUI and SNMP Design
• Fast Track Prototyping, Proof of Concept & Demonstrator Design
• Domestic and Offshore Manufacturing
• EMC, Safety and Environmental Testing & Conformance