Products > Test Equipment
Trimble Thunderbolt - Cheating? Aging product? Total lack of technical support
edpalmer42:
I looked for some kind of EOL document for the Thunderbolt, but couldn't find one. It looks like it ceased to be a 'current product' sometime before 2010. The typical Thunderbolt sold on ebay and elsewhere - i.e. the plain package - isn't even the retail version of the Thunderbolt with the red label. Who knows what the actual requirement was for the plain package version? Maybe they didn't even care about the year.
It doesn't surprise or upset me that it has this kind of problem since it's a GPS problem rather than a Trimble problem. Every GPS device that tries to extract the date from the satellites will have this type of headache eventually. As ebastler stated, support eventually ends for every product.
It's also worth noting that this issue doesn't affect the Thunderbolt's performance as a GPSDO, i.e. providing 1 PPS and 10 MHz signals locked to GPS. It only affects the year. The time and the rest of the date are still correct. Lady Heather already compensates for it. I've seen one report that a Linux fix has been implemented. I haven't seen anything official from ntp.org.
Ed
cdev:
One could just stick a newer more modern GPS in there hidden in some corner to provide the NEMA data.
max-bit:
Thunderbolt sold on eBay and Thunderbolt E (lab kit) are the same products.
Of course, Trimble does not care to support but sell new ones.
Of course, the problem is with the GPS (specification) but it can solve the software update.
However, Trimble does not care about that.
And here is the main problem.
max-bit:
To make it more ridiculous, after asking a technical question whether there is a possibility to reprogram the flash memory itself (, contact stopped.
Here is TRIMBLE suport
The device is an am29F400bb flash memory. So reprogramming memory is no problem.
ebastler:
--- Quote from: max-bit on August 02, 2017, 08:37:32 am ---To make it more ridiculous, after asking a technical question whether there is a possibility to reprogram the flash memory itself (, contact stopped.
Here is TRIMBLE suport
The device is an am29F400bb flash memory. So reprogramming memory is no problem.
--- End quote ---
Yes, Trimble sucks, in your opinion. We got that now. What else do you expect from this thread?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version