Shutoff of WWV-WWVH: two days left to the end of the subscription

Its not needed it's outdated old tech junk ..Time for new updated ways .So time to adapt to Life changes.........

 

Budget... yes budget it's all about money... without money it does not operate!!!!

 

As a younger ham I will be very sad to see WWV go away. It is the only reliable signal to check propagation and a familiar voice thats always on the air. Quite a bummer.

 

My only use of WWV was to make sure the calibrator on my SX-111 was calibrated...+/- 10 kHz or so .

 

Such as?

 

Maybe writing to your representative might help push this over the top, but we need pressure from other users to really accomplish the goal. Just keeping stations on the air for the occasional benefit of a bunch of old ham radio geeks is not gonna be enough to make a difference, IMO. Remember, alot of stuff we get is probably due to the fact it does not cost anything, like declaring some month Ham Radio Month, Congratulations and accolades, or changing the wording in some legislation a little bit.

 

you know... that's exactly what i was thinking. Instead of always relying on the government to do something, an/or worrying if they decide not to..... we as a group could simply do it ourselves.

Technically, it would be relatively simple: A good location with a nice antenna, a solid transmitter (or a few located around the country), a computer to provide the voice, and a high accuracy time standard (commercially available nowadays)

The REAL probelm would be in obtaining a waiver / variance from the FCC.... but if we were to keep the signals within our allotted bands, and call them "propagation beacons" then even that would be possible.

I guess the only REAL challenge would be to generate enough interest and participation to make it happen.

Maybe it's a viable idea, maybe not.

Dave
KK4NSF

 

How LOW tech!

TOM K8ERV Montrose Colo

 

FYI, the "We the People" petitions are, and always were, a joke. Nothing has ever come out of them other then some slick political soundbites (if you are even lucky enough to get that). I am unaware of ANY petitions (directed to either of the last two executives) that ever actually got ACTION other than said "responses".

 

Well, I've given up trying to use either WWV or WWVB as a local clock for an NTP server.

The audio drivers in Linux have migrated through at least 2 major changes since the WWV audio decoder was written and I've tried just about every soft link and hard link to point /dev/audio to every audio codec that comes with Fedora 28. Zip. Zero. Nada.

The best chance of getting the WWV audio decoder to work is to load up a legacy operating system like FreeBSD (which is pretty close to the Unix Sys V OS), but we continue to make progress and those who are not on the train of "progress" get left behind. "initd" is dead. "systemd" is now.

For WWVB, I found one daemon (radioclkd) which was written by a British fellow about 15 years ago. (http://www.buzzard.me.uk/jonathan/radioclock.html) After running my WWVB receiver through a MAX232 to convert TTL levels to RS-232 levels and hooking it to the DCD of a serial port, the "test" mode of radioclkd sees the transitions and the 200mS (0's), 500mS (1's) and 800mS (top of minute markers) but NTP (shared memory driver) just doesn't see it. I see a nice clean signal on the O'scope, but it's just not working.

I plug in a simple GPS USB receiver dongle and it works. Plain and simple.

It's even simpler for most network IT technicians. Install NTP and the default is to point to a pool of stratum 2 time servers. Accuracy < 100mS.

Without a PPS, GPS accuracy < 1 second.

Buh-by WWV...

There'll probably be a transition period before turning off WWVB. It'll give manufacturers time to start making "Wi-Fi NTP Wall Clocks". Then...

Buh-bu WWVB.

Hello GPSDO's for an accurate frequency reference.

 

I'm happy to be hearing WWV on 15 MHz.
https://swling.com/blog/2019/02/fy-2019-nist-budget-looks-good-for-time-stations/