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

I signed it and anyone with a license should do the same. It is a great tool to quickly check your radios for accuracy and set your clocks. If there are other time and frequency standards I am not aware (maybe I need enlightening).

 

GPS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System) has been available to the public since the 1990s...

It is beyond logic why anyone (who is aware of GPS) would want to maintain a dinosaur such as WWV[H], that is less effective and less useful. Maybe those people still use buggy-whips and typewriters.

 

You know, I'm a young ham and I can remember when I was little listening to the ticks of WWV. It's a shame that it may really be closing down. Whether it's tomorrow or a year from now, it's still a piece of amateur radio and radio in general that will be deeply missed.

73,
Ryan
KM6DYO

 

Well . my grandson is a lineman I'd like to see you automate that,( without elec.) We still have a lot of trades that a young person can get into that cannot be automated . All is not lost for the person who decides not to go to college and get into one of the occupations that are not possible to automate without changes to our total infrastructure . We as HAM's need to encourage our youngsters to do what they want in their lives without the fear of their jobs being "automated"

 

President Clinton signed a bill to unscramble the GPS satellites on his way out the door. Became effective in May 2000.

 

The corresponding section from the link appears to be this:

• On May 2, 2000 "Selective Availability" was discontinued as a result of the 1996 executive order, allowing civilian users to receive a non-degraded signal globally.

I believe it was available to civil users before that, clear back into the 1980s -- just with much less accuracy.

 

Things do change--a century ago learning Latin (and perhaps Greek) was expected of many college students. Still, one can go too far, and I believe shutting down these stations is a bad idea. Anyway, I've been teaching my grandchildren how to read dial clocks. They don't see them anymore. And they were fascinated by a rotary phone. But then I think about when I was a kid my father had to explain to me what a stick shift was, which meant also describing how a clutch worked. Such devices simply weren't part of my urban surroundings.

 

The accuracy was degraded 10X from about 5 meters to 50 meters.

Back in the 80's, I used to work with one of the architects of GPS, Dr. James Spilker at his company Stanford Telecommunications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Spilker

He was quite a character back then and was an avid body building enthusiast. Sometimes he'd come to work all buttered up with tanning lotion. He also had fabulous trophy wife. Before I was hired at Stanford Telecom, I worked across the street. When Mrs. Spilker would come to visit Jim, she would park her Mercedes in the street right in front of the building. The sales guy who had an office up front would spot her and call the engineers in the lab. We'd all run up front and ogle her in her Spandex workout outfit as she walked in. Good times!

 

My point is that GPS is mature technology.

 

Many of the modern day self setting digital clocks use WWV signal to set themselves. If these stations shut down those clocks will no longer work by setting themselves. They need the WWV signal folks.

 

They do (technically, it's the WWVB LF transmitter), and they are still on the market. I saw several at Walmart just this evening.

If they want to shut down WWVB, there needs to be a sunset period. First, the existing products need to be removed from the market. After that, there needs to be notice given that the transmitter will be shutting down in X number of years, which allows people to start replacing their clocks with something else.

FCC did something vaguely similar with DTV. They warned that the conversion would start and end by specific dates, and that gave both the market and consumers time to adapt.

The HF transmitters of WWV proper are another matter, and it has been a long time since I saw a consumer clock (or any grade of mass-produced clock) that set itself from the 100Hz subcarrier of WWV signals.

 

well done IZ2EWV , Iam sure that guy critisising your English does not speak any foreign language at all !

 

Then when does It close down?

 

It having been on for a century pretty much non-stop Is another reason To save It.

 

Some enterprising Amatuer radio club could keep this going. Maybe the ARRL could offer some support..