Understood and fair enough. I'm just concerned our discussion focus on just WWV/WWVH, originally caused by erroneous "reporting" by SWLing.com and no checks in the ARRL repost, is leading many to miss the point WWVB is on the chopping block.
Not a bad idea but the NPS is apparently selling off properties too. My suggestion would be make their facilities a public-private sponsored active MUSEUM. Part of the Smithsonian Institution. I haven't seen anything about them trimming their $1.2B budget of which a lot comes from the Fed. Add fee based recreational tours and educational element, voluntarily staffed, and the present service mission could be further commercialized. Get the operation a lot closer to self-funding. Or totally private like as mentioned the Maritime Radio Historical Society, or how about this interesting ex-gov site with its amateur radio friendly discone antenna (!)
I bought T-shirts and other souvenirs when we toured the NRAO in West Virginia last year. I would definitely add WWV to a vacation intinerary for tours and merchandise if I were out that way.
Just to clarify my suggestion further, even if the political climate demands streamlining, I still think the NIST should maintain and operate the time and frequency standards. However, the burdens of broadcasting by radio perhaps could be picked up by others with the NIST and others supplying their data as basic content. An out-of-the-box idea; promote & online auction off opportunities to upload a clip and be "The Voice" doing the time announcing. There are only SIXTY of such revenue generating "spots" available each hour (!) I bet a lot of celebs and others with excessive discretionary funds would bid up for that status. Tell all your social media friends when you'll be on-the-air declaring "At the tone XX hours NN minutes, coordinated universal time ..." There are 525,600 minutes in a year. At only $10 a minute that = $5,256,000. That nearly covers the entire proposed budget reduction. I would pay $10 for one shot even if in the middle of the night.
FYI, here's a great paper about WWVB written to commemorate it's 50th anniversary in 2014. It's original purpose was as a LF frequency reference, free of the ionospheric distortion that HF based WWV suffers, but today serves primarily as a time-of-day standard for all those "atomic" clocks out there. Some good reading! https://ws680.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=914782
There are a lot of digital clocks out there that will be rendered useless by this decision. Who comes up with these decisions, anyway? Sounds like time to write my congressman...
The Orange Cheetohead nominated this guy for NIST director http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...fer-seen-top-priorities-nist-director-nominee And then ordered him to reduce NIST budget by 30% He did, and this is the result; the proposed budget is forwarded from the Whitehouse. Look at all the science and research being cut! You can figure out the agenda. Yeah, call and write Congress critters. But next time, pick a better president.
re: "It's original purpose was as a LF frequency reference, free of the ionospheric distortion that HF based WWV suffers," Heathkit plant on Hilltop Road in ST Joseph used this technique; 10 MHz was developed from a local correctable "reference" and an HP 117A LF rcvr was used to correct that local 10 MHz reference which was then delivered to all the engineering cubes ... "A VLF Comparator for Relating Local Frequency to U. S. Standards" using the HP117A: http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1964-10.pdf and http://www.prc68.com/I/117A.shtml
re: "He did, and this is the result;" ALOTTACUTS in en-viro stuff too, if ya look at it ... what should the core responsibility at NIST be? Something to do with, um "standards" maybe?
re: "Which gets me back to my point. Ham's don't need NIST traceable frequency standard" I've posted not just a few times now of an application where a 10 MHz GPSDO at a 2-way radio manufacturer was verified each day with 10 MHz WWV; this was done to answer the plant managers's question: "How do you know your GPSDO box is working?"
