The ALTA global positioning satellite based timing system

The Alberta Large-area Time-coincidence Array (ALTA) experiment uses a number of scintillation detector systems to form a sparse very large area cosmic air-shower detection array. An important scientific goal of the ALTA collaboration is to search for coincidences in the ALTA array due to large area cosmic ray phenomena. A local cosmic ray event, determined by a coincidence of the triplet of cosmic ray detectors forming a local detector system, is time stamped with a temporal coordinate obtained from a GPS receiver. The readout of the data, the local coincidence and the GPS time stamp are all performed in the local readout crate. This time stamp, along with the local shower direction is used to search for coincidences within the large area array. Using two GPS receivers and duplicate sets of ALTA electronics the timing resolution of the GPS time difference between sites was estimated to be 16 ns.