Quote:
Originally Posted by electronjohn
So-called "atomic" clocks actually use the digital signal from WWVB @ 60kHz for their timebase. WWVB evidently won't be affected by the shutdown.
That being said, the proposed shutdown seems to me to be a case of "cutting off your nose to spite your face". In the greater scheme of things, the operational costs are a tiny, tiny fraction of government spending. In fact, the government spends that amount on other things approximately every 30 seconds. WWV/WWVH as a source of accurate time information may be bordering on obsolete, but, as a source for extremely accurate frequency information they are invaluable...not to mention periodic updates on solar conditions, ocean weather, etc. "Internet time" may be useful for ordinary purposes, but there's an inherent lag of a few milliseconds in the time info.
And, like many, a WWV QSL card was among the first I received all those years ago. Ended up verifying them on all their frequencies, as well as WWVH on 5 & 10 mHz. 'VH is a tough catch here in the Midwest, propagation has to be just right to enable reception. One plus is that WWVH uses a female voice for the announcements rather than a male used on WWV.
Old radio joke: "My last gig was morning drive on WWV"  |
Until I read this post, I had no idea WWV was going to shut down.
I heard WWVH once years ago, here in northeastern Ohio, when I had a decent antenna for my HF ham radio station before I moved. WWV itself was in its hourly silent period, and one night I could hear WWVH very faintly in the background. I never heard WWVH again after that.
BTW: The shutdown of WWV will have a profound effect on many devices, particularly those which use the station's time signal to set the clock, etc. Witness what happened when TV went completely digital in 2009. Some VCRs, particularly Panasonic ones, used the time signal from the local PBS station to automatically set the clock; when TV went 100 percent digital, this feature was immediately rendered permanently useless. Computers use a time signal as well to set their system clocks, but that signal comes from the Internet; I don't think it is from WWV.
There is a government website operated by NIST, the URL of which is
www.time.gov. This site provides the same time and frequency information as does WWV, so the imminent demise of the latter does not mean the end of the NIST's time/frequency standard services. The NIST website itself is
www.nist.gov; it also provides essentially if not exactly the same services as WWV and the time.gov site I mentioned.