Maintain funding for NIST stations WWV and WWVH

This just proves that nobody actually reads anything. My earlier link to this rolled out of sight. Soon your link will roll out of sight. Then someone else can post it again. But it doesn't matter because there is not enough interest for any of them to hit their goal. Nobody else cares, and not enough of us care.

 

re: "The rest of the world relies on either satellite signals or an internet connection for time synchronization."

Is that _all_ you think (or believe, I cannot, of course, tell which) that WWV/WWVH/WWVB are good for?

 

Let me see. Time can be had accurately from sats and on the net, it is close enough for ham purposes. Frequency can be had from sats. Unless you own a standard. Propagation info can be had from plenty other sources. So it seems it is a nostalgia thing for a rather small population to keep it up on SW. WWVB does have utility outside of ham radio. I don't dislike WWV, I may sign the petition, but it is like when NAA on 3000 meters went away in 1956, lot of hams moaned about how it had been around since spark days, and had been useful for code practice, weather, news, etc. since they were kiddees, in the case that anyone could still receive it with the radios they still had in '56. How many SWLs left in the USA on top of hams? Hey maybe they can convince NPR to broadcast time checks at the top of the hour!

 

So, no cross-checks of your in house"standards" against a live, direct NIST source? The only checks you can make in a timely manner is your 'sat source' (assume a GPSDO) vs your in-house Rubidium standard? And, of course, the monetary expense for both (PLUS the operational expense, the AC power consumed, the square footage occupied inside the lab or home office) , and neither of which is still a direct compare with NIST ...

 

I use Dimension 4 to keep my entire network and computers on accurate time. I have not listened to WWV in years. Maybe it is old technology whose time has come.

 

I hear Wal-Mart is a great place to shop, too.

 

If these stations stop transmitting does that mean my Citizen ECO Drive SkyHawk Blue Angel watch can't be time synchronized anymore?
https://www.amazon.com/Citizen-JY0050-55L-Skyhawk-Titanium-Eco-Drive/dp/B001QFYKTA

 

I figure if i'm going to pay taxes for a government operated public service, I actually want to get the service I am paying for.

WWV is no exception to this principle in practice.

 

Would this mean our "atomic" clocks would no longer get reset? There must be a gazillion of those in use by now.

 

K7RQ, I think the context of the original quote has been somehow lost and we now have a non-sequitur in progress ...

 

I guess we are all guilty of not reading every single post

 

Does anybody care about this? www.usdebtclock.org

Every bit of government spending has a small group of people who say THEY WILL DIE if their funding gets cut.

Standard tactic for any government agency when threatened with budget cuts is to cut only things that will visibly hurt their customers. (I know this... I was a federal employee for 28 years.)

We are approaching $24T in "on the books" debt. I've seen more and more anecdotal evidence which suggests this is the point of no return.

I don't think anyone cares about accurate time and frequency down in Venezuela right now.

There's an unused part of a section in article 5 of our constitution which would get better results than any petition with internet signatures on it. (How many of those signatures were hacked and meddled and influenced by <insert some country here>?

I'm just hoping and praying the current administration is planning to do something about this after he's re-elected. The timing will be right.

I just wrote a quick Linux bash script to read the NMEA string off my handheld GPS unit and print out the time. This is accurate enough for my needs. Now to write an algorithm which takes this "1 pulse per second" and use it to make a local 10 Mhz oscillator as accurate as possible.

 

re: "I just wrote a quick Linux bash script to read the NMEA string off my handheld GPS unit"

What business does the government have in launching GPS birds for civilian use anyway? I could see for military use, and that was the purpose initially (following on the heels of the Navy's satellite navigation system called TRANSIT). I think we spend FAR more on GPS than we do on WWV/WWVH/WWVB ...

 

re: "I don't think anyone cares about accurate time and frequency down in Venezuela right now."

Where's our military presently stationed around the world - any forces located off our shores?? Do we have any 'shipping' going on on the high seas with US-flagged vessels? How much of the continental US is reliably covered by cellular? How about internet service? Do we have 100% coverage yet (outside of quirky satellite phones that no normal person can afford)?