A new NTRIP caster is available for preview — please test before Thursday August 6th
Charlie Sievers
Hi everyone,
We're upgrading the infrastructure behind the NSF NGF Real-Time GNSS/NTRIP service, and the new caster is available today for you to test against, ahead of an upcoming switch-over.
Try it now: ntrip-preview.earthscope.org
The dashboard: https://ntrip-preview.earthscope.org
The preview caster uses the same ports, credentials, and licenses as the current service — point your existing NTRIP client at the new hostname to try it. Nothing changes on your end unless you choose to test it.
What's new
Caster Web Dashboard. A new web dashboard lets you check caster health, per-mountpoint stream availability, and (once signed in with your EarthScope account) your own license seat usage — no more guessing on caster, stream, and license status. This dashboard will also make community announcements and describe outages or upgrades.
Encrypted (TLS) connections. Every data stream is now also available over TLS, on a dedicated port 1000 higher than today's port — e.g. RTCM 3.3 moves from 2101 to 3101 for an encrypted connection, BINEX from 2105 to 3105, and Onboard PPP from 2108 to 3108. The existing unencrypted ports keep working exactly as they do today — TLS is optional, but recommended if your connection crosses an untrusted network.
Better performance under load. We've reworked how the caster handles client connections internally so each connection is served independently, improving responsiveness when many clients connect at once.
A note on NTRIP v1 vs. v2. If you're still using NTRIP v1, please consider moving to v2. Under the v1 spec, requesting a mountpoint that doesn't exist or isn't currently active returns the full sourcetable — which is fine occasionally, but if a client misconfiguration causes repeated requests for a bad mountpoint, that can look like a denial-of-service against the caster. We now rate-limit sourcetable responses per client to protect the service; if you hit that limit under NTRIP v1 you'll start getting "not found" responses instead of the sourcetable. NTRIP v2 avoids this entirely — a missing/inactive mountpoint always gets a clean "not found" response, no sourcetable download involved. If you're not sure which version your client uses, this is a good time to check.
Smaller reliability and accuracy improvements throughout — see the dashboard's Seats page for a more accurate, real-time view of your license usage.
Licenses
The new caster uses the same licenses as the current caster. The license software treats usage on both towards your usage limits. Please be aware of this as you test out the new system. If this is a limitation for your testing, test against streams you are already accessing on the current system, as this won’t add to your license limit.
Statistics
While the licenses are common to both the current and preview caster, the statistics displayed on the preview caster are only for the preview caster. When looking at the dashboard, you’ll only see information for the streams you are accessing on the preview caster. Furthermore, the completeness data only goes back to July 7th.
What we need from you
Please test your usual connection(s) against ntrip-preview.earthscope.org before Thursday August 6th. We're especially interested in hearing about:
Any client that has trouble connecting or authenticating.
Whether TLS connectivity works for you, if you try it.
Your experience with the new dashboard.
What happens next
On Thursday August 6th ntrip.earthscope.org itself will switch over to this new caster — you won't need to change anything if you're already connecting to the standard hostname. We'll send a follow-up notice once that switch is complete, along with a short window during which the previous caster will remain reachable at its old address for anyone who needs a bit more time to transition.
Questions or issues? Reply to this email or contact he...@earthscope.org.
Thanks