The pcfclock(4) driver supports the
parallel port radio clock sold by
Conrad Electronic under order numbers 967602 and 642002. This
radio clock is put between a parallel port and your printer. It
receives the legal German time, which is either CET or CEST, from the
DCF77
transmitter and uses it to set its internal quartz clock. The DCF77
transmitter is located near to Frankfurt/Main and covers a radius of
more than 1500 kilometers.
The pcfdate(8) utility gets and displays the date and time from a pcfclock device and optionally sets the system time.
Starting with version 4.0.98g the Network Time Protocol distribution supports the pcfclock driver.
The pcfclock driver and the pcfdate utility are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The latest release of the distribution is 0.15.
If you are a Debian GNU/Linux user you can get binary and source packages by putting the following lines into /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://home.germany.net/101-181039/ unstable/ deb-src http://home.germany.net/101-181039/ unstable/
Users of other GNU/Linux systems can download the archived source code. Information about a FreeBSD driver is available at Sascha Schumann's site.
The pcfclock driver is based on a program written by Joachim König. You can get it from Joachim's home page.
Harald Milz has compiled a list of DCF77 resources for Linux. You can find more information about radio clocks on the Radio Clock home page.
Return to Andreas' home page.
Updated: 29th October 2000