It is important to understand the wording in the NIST funding proposal includes eliminating WWVB too.
Riiiight. I bet the electric bill alone would eat up a sizable chunk of that $200k - how many bands are they operating on? 10kW or so per band? 7/24/356? Plus all the HVAC costs? If you're looking for an SLA in the 99.999% range, you're looking at redundant everything - 2 or more transmitters per band and the switch gear that need to be maintained and tested, UPS systems to handle all the transmitter and critical loads till your backup generators kick in, that's batteries, maintenance, testing on 3 phase UPS systems, generators, transfer switches, etc., and 7/24/365 emergency maintenance personnel for RF equipment, generators, HVAC, UPS, etc. Plus the people needed for regular operations - pay the bills, work with contractors, oversee operations, quality checks and reports, backup testing, etc. All of this is without regards to the timing source and its costs. Then there is the tower and facility maintenance for a 5 nines of reliability - inspections and corrections to the towers, ground system, etc. Dealing with weather damage - hail, lightning, snow/ice wind, etc. Fencing, physical security, road maintenance, fire mitigation efforts, the list is LONG. You have to be very proactive - reactive means downtime. If you wanted 1 band, best effort (might be on the air, might not), and someone would do it for free or as a labor of love (next to zero wage), and someone gifted you the site, equipment, etc. then maybe - excluding any major infrastructure issues.
The government spends 6 million dollars every 90 seconds, and they are concerned about a useful engineering tool the private sector, scientific community and commercial industry has relied on using for almost 100 years?
This whole topic boils down to simply this for me, especially since the new tax bill raised my federal tax burden $6k. If NIST is going all out to maintain and improve this spiffy apparatus called... The Primary Time and Frequency Standard for the United States https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/primary-standard-nist-f1 ...I feel pretty well entitled to partake of its wondrous accuracy and stability whenever I so please via the 60 kHz, 2.5 MHz, 5 MHz, 10 MHz, 15 MHz, 20 MHz and experimentally 25 MHz carriers that are, no doubt, directly tied to this thing. It's a matter of principle for all and a technical benefit for myself and other rf technical folks. It appears someone started a petition... https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/maintain-funding-nist-stations-wwv-wwvh
I'm not sure what time it is, but it's either Saturday in the Park or Another Rainy Day in New York City.
I like WWV. I remember listening to WWV as a kid. I suppose that one can make an argument about the fun/educational/recreational value of WWV. And I really hope that it stays on the air, without either of my suggestions below. However my hope and $1 will buy a cup of coffee.... 1) Is the value of WWV to industry and commerce high enough that it could be supported with user fees? You could take the signal and modulate it using a pseudonoise code, sort of like 'selective availability' in the GPS system. Commercial users could then pay a fee for a demodulation box. If you don't need super accuracy (say you just listen for fun) then you can still receive the degraded signal. 2) Would it be possible to create some sort of lower power _distributed_ system that does what WWV does? In much the same way that all GPS satellites transmit on the same set of frequencies, using different PN codes to differentiate the transmissions, could you have transceivers that create some sort of mesh network, discipline each other, and distribute time and frequency standards from a central source? Even if WWV goes away, NIST and USNO will continue to maintain accurate clocks; the issue is dissemination of these accurate time bases. Just trying thinking out loud here... 73 Jon AF7TS
Everyone has gotten all wound up over six-month old Administration budget request for NIST to take a 40% budget cut, and to meet that directed cut NIST had to include shutting down WWV. However, the actual appropriation bills moving through Congress have much smaller cuts, about 15%. Plus, that cut is almost entirely from the facility construction budget. The S&T Research & Services budget is essentially unchanged from 2018, specifically the Laboratory Programs budget, which contains the WWV stuff, is unchanged. While the bills do not specifically state that WWV is "safe", I think that the fact that the administrations budget cut is NOT reflected in the appropriates bills, and that probably means that there's no need to panic. Congress only gives an overall Laboratory Programs budget, so NIST could still reduce or eliminate WWV on their own if they wanted to use the money elsewhere. But the point is that the Budget Request from February that has everyone all worked up, is moot at this point since the Congress did not follow it. See this article from late June from the American Institute of Physics: https://www.aip.org/fyi/2018/fy19-appropriations-bills-national-institute-standards-and-technology See the dollar details and links to the appropriations bills here: https://www.aip.org/fyi/federal-science-budget-tracker#tabs-section-nist
Or maybe the demise of the radio stations in question are simply a fact of them being collateral damage from being lumped in with other programs that our anti science government does simply to muddy the waters as to what programs they are truly after. The following 4 additional NIST programs are also on the cutting block along with WWV, WWVH and WWVB. -$6.6 million in environmental measurements projects across NIST laboratories, including work measuring the impact of aerosols on pollution and climate change, and gas reference materials used by industry to reduce costs of complying with regulations -$5.8 million eliminating the NIST Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Measurements program, including Urban Dome research grants to advance the direct measurement of GHG emissions on the scale of cities or regions. -$6.7 million in forensic science, reducing the program size to $7.3 million by prioritizing measurement science in the NIST labs and eliminating program management functions and external grants for the Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science and the Forensic Science Center of Excellence -$4.1 million in R&D targeting application of NIST quantum breakthroughs to applied measurement needs, including temperature and atmospheric gas metrology.. In the past and present our government officials have been known to muddy the waters as to what the real top programs on their chopping block truly are and I doubt that WWV, WWVH and WWVB are at the very top of their hit list.
$6 Million to keep the WWV based transmitters on the air is Equivalent to current taxpayer spending for any one of the following items: 2 prisoners in Guantanamo, or, 3 Florida trips to play golf, or, 2 months keeping 500 stolen children in cages. It's all a matter of importance and perspective. I'd rather have my money spent on keeping our NIST science and technology going... it's something that is actually productive.
keep reading...the point was not the story... a couple posts further down... It wasn't bullshit that the govt spend $132 per pencil...
