Thoughts on Vendor Approved List?

General
1

During the March 2026 Time Enthusiasts Sync Up, the idea of having a a vendor approved list for vendors, capabilities, limitations, and best fit profiles for both open source and commercial offerings was brought up.

NTP has this published list and I have a google doc of known timing products vendors.

The question is: how do we vet “approved” vendors (or products)?

  • start individual topics for each vendor in the appropriate project’s Hardware topic? as in, we start with our personal faves and indicate why we like that product, who it is suitable for, and its price range?

Definitely open to ideas on how to proceed as this would definitely be a valuable resource.

2 Likes
2

I agree that this would be useful. I’m interested to hear what would be best for folks.

3

CenterClick a vendor of low-end NTP servers that we’ve been very pleased with:

The non-POE version is about $200; add about $50 for POE, which lets us mount the entire thing outdoors in a weatherproof box, fed by POE Ethernet. Wonderfully techy GUI.

-mel

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As a 501(c)(3), NTF must be very careful regarding things like publishing an “approved” vendor list. Let me see what I can figure out in this regard.

5

This message led me to contact CenterClick.

All communication was handled by email, and they responded quickly - even outside normal business hours. They shipped an NTP270 with an external antenna and a 10-meter cable from New Hampshire, USA to Chihuahua, Mexico via DHL. The package arrived well packed in just 3 business days.

The hardest part of the setup was figuring out which IP address the device received from the DHCP server. After that, everything was straightforward. By the time I could open the web interface, the unit was already synchronized with the satellites.

I configured my public NTP server to use the NTP270 as one of its Chrony sources, and for an entire week it consistently performed as the best source. I’ve now replaced my previous Linux/Chrony public server with the NTP270 itself. It doesn’t have the same client capacity as the Linux/Chrony setup, but I now run a Stratum 1 public NTP server on ntppool.org.

For the price - even including shipping costs - it’s a very good Stratum 1 NTP time source.

-Fer

1 Like
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Sadly, NTP270 does not have enough capacity to serve enough clients to be a public NTP server. I put back the Linux/Chrony as public server and kept NT270 configured as one of its servers, being selected as current best.

-Fer