The number of Phasor Measurement Units (PMU) is growing rapidly. The metrological institutes and calibration laboratories has to calibrate not only PMUs, but also calibrators of PMUs. To achieve this goal, several reference PMU systems have been built. These systems use costly time synchronization units.The paper shows another method to trace a digitizer to a standard of time. The advantage of the method is removing a need to obtain a time synchronization unit. Setup of a reference PMU system using the method is described and uncertainty budget is shown. The budget shows out the presented method achieved sufficiently low uncertainties required for calibration of PMU calibrators.