Colleges and Universities can pick up the slack on this. NIST and Universities get enough Taxpayer funds. Narrow it down to one source not many.
When I looked at the linked document, I found that text on page NIST-25, not NIST-12. Interestingly, it sounds like they're wanting to cut off not only WWV and WWVH, but also WWVB. From earlier posts on the topic, I got the impression that WWVB was not scheduled for shutdown, but the official document seems to indicate it's on the chopping block. They don't specify the call signs or frequencies, but since WWVB is one of the stations located at Ft. Collins, and it is the primary one that synchronizes consumer electronic products like wall clocks, clock radios and wristwatches, its future doesn't look bright. Most of us hams are more familiar with the HF stations WWV and WWVH, since we listen to them on our shortwave receivers. But WWVB probably impacts many more households, because there are a lot of cheap consumer goods that sync themselves using its signal. I know I've got three radio controlled "atomic" clocks at home, and it is very handy to have a wall clock that needs no manual adjustment, ever. Those clocks run for many months on small AA batteries, only turning on the receiver a few times a day. They need no wiring. The ability to get a signal indoors, using extremely low power, is an application that can't be duplicated by GPS. I've also got a wristwatch that syncs using WWVB, using just the power from a tiny battery charged by a solar cell on the face of the watch. Granted, auto-setting clocks like that aren't vital to national security, and don't really have laboratory precision, but they're a very handy and inexpensive source of time which is more than accurate enough for any household purpose I can think of. If this goes through, I'd be tempted to build a small, low-power 60kHz oscillator, and use something like a GPS-synced or NTP-synced Raspberry Pi to manipulate its power and simulate the scheme used by WWVB. I'd make my own WWVB-like transmitter, just barely strong enough to sync the clocks in my house. But I'd rather NIST keep on broadcasting the signals.
It's easy to imagine that not even the NIST knows every service and device that could be impacted by this decision. In addition to all of the consumer products mentioned above, I know of medical devices, traffic signals, and municipal transit systems that depend on the WWVB broadcasts.
It's not hard to receive WWVB at 60.Khz either. I've picked it up in Virginia on my G5RV using my Kenwood TS-590S, and then decoded it with the clock program from http://f6cte.free.fr/
Yup. And if the timebase/ref osc my S1327 Motorola service monitor is no longer accurate (VERY easy to check against 10 MHz WWV) and I check/set/adjust the crystal/timebase or reference oscillator in my UHF repeater, well, it too will be off as will be any customer radios I run across the bench during yearly PMs ... No biggie though - right?
What problem are we trying to solve? A time tick on HF. How much does that cost? Not much. A few 10KW transmitters in colorado and hawaii, electricity to run them 24x7x365, a few retired enginerds part time to maintain said transmitters. Some surplus / unused antenna arrays. I'm sure I could do it for $200K/year, probably a lot less... think about it -- hams have HF stations that don't cost $200K in a lifetime, let alone $200K each and every year. We could save more by decommissioning the totally worthless ARRL "bulletin station" and repurpose it for HF time stamp. tick tick tick... As for the time stamp itself -- well there's GPS, then there's the time standard in Greenwich England, then there's internet clock, then there's my $19 sharper image Atomic Particle Decay clock that's kept perfect time for the past decade.... Many ways to solve this problem. Reminds me of the infamous USA space pen -- NASA and the government spent millions of dollars of tax payer money to invent a pen and ink that could work and flow in zero gravity and at the cold temperatures in space. It took 4 years to develop. Thousands of man hours. Countless tests. And even then, it was not totally reliable... The Russians.... they had the same problem.... they just used a pencil... "We Can't" people suck...
At the sound of the tone, four hours, twenty seven minutes coordinated universal t..... crickets.....
I have seen this "pen vs pencil" bit a dozen times or more... and it is not true. Imagine graphite particles, which are highly conductive, floating around in your space capsule...getting into all that electronics that is keeping you alive. Not good. Snopes, while not always reliable will give you the correct story here.
And just how do you think it did that? Will it continue to be a source of accurate time after WWVB is off the air?
It has a built in atomic (think it's cezium) decay module.... no battery or signal required...that's how it "did that"...
