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WWV Shortwave Time Broadcasts May Be Slashed In 2019 (qrz.com)
New submitter SteveSgt writes: A forum thread on QRZ.com indicates that the shortwave time broadcasts by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from stations WWV (Colorado) and WWVH (Hawaii) may be slashed in budget year 2019. [One of the proposed reductions includes "$6.3 million supporting fundamental measurement dissemination, including the shutdown of NIST radio stations in Colorado and Hawaii."] While the WWV broadcasts may seem like an anachronism to some Slashdotters, they remain a crucial component in many unexpected services, from over-the-air broadcasters and traffic signals, to medical devices, wall clocks, and wrist watches. The signals serve as standard beacons for radio propagation, and as a frequency reference for alignment of a broad range of communications equipment. It's easy to imagine that not even the NIST knows every service and device that could be impacted by this decision.
This, coincident with a $717B Defense Authorization?
We need to have a very serious conversation with the god who blessed America. Fucker's high on something.
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GPS tend to be more expensive but I'd really like to see a $50 wall clock that's always accurate to milliseconds and, on the other hand, I can place that clock in areas that can't receive a GPS signal. Sure fewer people are wearing watches but it seems to be the norm on all emergency services and military personnel as well as some of us who just enjoy to easily tell the time from a durable device that doesn't need to charge every night. Sure GPS may be better in many situations but there are a lot of valid use cases where WWV still is the best solution, in my opinion.
The NIST is under the Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, who is a cryptkeeper who only stays alive through daily applications of graft and corruption. Here's an article about just how corrupt this ancient swamp thing really is.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/d...
The $6,3 million saved will pay for a lot of KFC Gravy Bowls on Air Force One. Plus, Colorado and Hawaii voted for Hillary, so fuck them libs, amirite? Trump is just that kind of petty degenerate..
You are welcome on my lawn.
NIST is taking a gigantic budget hit. WWV/etc is just one victim. We are headed back to the scientific dark ages...
From what I've read, there was no mention of WWV-B, the VLF broadcast that such gadgets as people's clocks depend on. Is that on the chopping block too? (probably. grr)
They used to be, back when clocks were powered from an AC wall socket. Their gears were synchronized with the AC motor, and the power company worked really really hard to make sure the long-term average AC cycle was exactly 60 Hz. If equipment problems caused the frequency to drop slightly below 60 Hz, they'd run at slightly above 60 Hz for long enough to get the clocks back on the correct time.
Then we switched to clocks running off batteries with built-in quartz timing mechanisms. In theory they're better, but in practice they're never calibrated well enough or their calibration drifts with age and temperature, making them less accurate than the old AC powered clocks. The best quartz watch I had lost a little less than a second a month. Then I got too greedy and killed the golden goose - tried adjusting the quartz timing mechanism myself. After that I could never get it below 2 seconds of drift per month. What I didn't realize until it was too late was that as the error gets smaller, you have to wait longer between each adjustment (weeks) to determine if you had improved it or overshot. With the 60 Hz power line method, only a single clock has to be calibrated to be super-accurate; and all the other clocks powered by AC synchronize off it.
on 60 kHz. The WWV/WWVH services being cut are on HF (2.5-25 MHz).
The loss of those frequencies will obsolete the older HF clocks, like the Heathkit GC-1000 "Most Accurate Clock" I have in my ham shack. As well as removing the other functions they provided besides time, such as precision frequency reference (zero beat a signal generator or receiver VFO against WWV's carrier, and you know it is exactly on frequency), and the various frequencies throughout the HF band provide useful propagation checks, as well.
Oh well, the $6M they save can pay off a lot of porn stars, or cover the security detail for a couple rounds of golf in Bedminster...
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This may surprise you, but GPS in-building penetration is zero. Whereas the longwave signals from WWV keep a clock I have in my basement synchronized. So yeah, GPS does a vastly better job at providing location, because that's what it's for, and pretty much is shit for providing cheap time sync. ... *a day*.
Oh, and as of the 2012 budget, GPS operating costs were $2M
The real issue here is that this is something that primarily provides a useful service for the little guy and doesn't have armies of lobbyists shilling it, so even if it cost $1.50/yr, let's cut it, because it's SOCIALISM.
The fact that we're bankrupting and sacrificing ourselves with illegal, immoral wars to prop up Nixon's petrodollar while allowing our social institutions and infrastructure to decay is very relevant to the discussion. The fact that this grotesque irresponsibility is the driver of capitalism's collapse and American social decay is very, very relevant. Personally, I consider these to be the most relevant aspects of the discussion.
I would be ashamed of myself were I one given more to reaction than reflection.
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I don't have any good links, but it's not too complicated...
The radio beacon travels at (roughly) the speed of light. That's about 300 million meters per second, so there's a 1ms delay after the signal gets to be 300 km away.
From a technical perspective, all communications (including Internet-based systems) are bound by that same speed, and trying to break that cosmic limit has proven to be extremely difficult, so engineers have done what engineers do best: they cheat.
The "fancy" algorithm is really pretty simple, conceptually: Instead of just accepting a time beacon, the NTP client measures how long it takes to ask for a time, and assumes that the time it receives was accurate halfway through the round-trip time. For example, if it takes 14ms to get a message saying it's exactly noon, that message was probably received very close to 7 ms after noon, so NTPd will set the local clock accordingly. It's not perfect, because the round-trip time might not be symmetrical, but it's close enough for most practical purposes. Using WiFi might add a bit of delay, but as long as the delay is symmetric, it won't be a problem.
The key for NTP is that it's a client-server protocol, so the client knows approximately how long the message was in transit. A one-way radio beacon like WWV doesn't have that, but that also means WWV doesn't need to receive transmissions from clients to function.
GPS is even fancier. A GPS satellite transmits not just a time beacon, but also a message with the satellite's location when the beacon was sent. Once a receiver has learned the locations and delays for at least four satellites, it can start to determine its own location. First, it will compare the satellites' locations and delays relative to other satellites to figure out where the receiver could possibly be on Earth. Then it can use that location to determine the exact delay for each satellite's signal, which is then used (just like in NTP) to compute the actual time.
GPS is superior to both NTP and WWV, because it is still a one-way communication system, but also isn't subject to any network traffic or assumptions about symmetry. With no prior knowledge, a GPS receiver can accurately compute both its location and time.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.