INGEMATION INGENIERÍA makes a new delivery of the “master clock system” for the fourth corvette built at Navantia’s shipyards

The “Master Clock System” that we have developed for the fourth Saudi corvette, built in the Navantia shipyard in San Fernando, was delivered last Tuesday, 13th April. This system comes in addition to the three previously supplied, out of a total of six. Five of them for the vessels and one to be installed in Navantia.

 

The Time Centre consists of new functionality that will allow the servers to distribute time signals to NTP clients and provide accurate time data to radio communications systems based on “Have Quick II A”. This type of radio communications systems are used for the protection of military UHF radio traffic in air-to-air and ground-to-air communications; they essentially provide time information to prevent communications from being intercepted.

 

The fourth corvette’s Master Clock System is composed of twenty-two clocks. All clocks are synchronised with the time centre with an accuracy of better than 1 millisecond.

This project is a commitment by our client Navantia to Cádiz technology and to our company, which is consolidating its position in the market as a reference in the supply of time centres with advanced functions.

 

HOW THE TIME CENTRES WORK

 

A time switch is a device capable of supplying a time reference and the exact time to other devices. For this purpose, the Network Time Protocol (NTP), among others, is used.  Nowadays, to disseminate accurate time information, protocols are required to enable and support this transport. The most widely used is NTP (Network Time Protocol); an Internet protocol for synchronising the clocks of computer systems through packet routing in networks with variable latency.

 

Or to put it more clearly: it can indicate the time accurately even when communication channels are degraded. For example, if a computer requests the time from another computer to keep its clock synchronised with the rest, if the communication medium is very saturated, it may happen that when the response with the time arrives, some time has already passed, which would be a mismatch and they would never be synchronised. The NTP protocol allows this situation to be alleviated.