Shutdown of WWV in 2019?
 

This is not good news for hams, experimenters, SWLs or anybody with a self setting "atomic clock/wristwatch"... Anybody here use the WWV signals?

http://www.arrl.org/news/concern-ris...-down-proposal

jr

At the tone...time will be 3 hours....45 minutes GMT....BEEP! doo---doo---doo---doo...

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/pet...tions-wwv-wwvh

Send it to all your friends, I did and have gotten about 20 signatures added. WWV/H are useful and an institution.

I have a device that uses the signal. I also use the HF signals as a reference for my SW radios.

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" :)

There seems to be some confusion about WWVB as shown here on swling.com:

https://swling.com/blog/2018/08/info...adio-stations/

The Casio g-shock watch page says thier watches WILL be affected:

https://www.g-central.com/usa-multi-...ible-shutdown/

:scratch2: jr

I (and many other ham operators) are taking notice of this, and are signing the petition. The shutdown of WWV will effect many people, and not just us radio guys. Besides, in the vast scheme of things, the cost to keep it on the air is negligible. As somebody else said, one trip to Mar-A-Lago would cover a big chunk of the entire NIST budget.

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.

I signed the petition & passed the link along to a few others.

Hm... I have my Windows PC clock automatically set daily via time.nist.gov because if I don't, it goes wildly inaccurate, like ten minutes a week!

Hate to see it go, its still useful to many. We will have CHU for
now though.......

73 Zeno

Ads for the 6.3 Million Dollars
 

Do like PBS does now, Put commercials on for five seconds when the WWVH is talking and at WWVH put on commercials when WWV is talking and sponsor the $ 6.3 Million a Year.

They should keep one frequency alive, say 10.00 MHz. Who will get these "protected" frequencies? I can hear Bro Stair on them.

That's funny. You know, WWV is one of the few stations on the shortwave bands without Brother Scare.

I can hear Brother Stair saying, "Are you looking for WWV? You should be looking for God!"

Didn't Bro Stair recently get busted for some kinda very naughty behavior?

Yep, he sure did. Allegedly, he likes the company of young girls who live (if you can call it living) in his compound. They arrested him, but I haven't heard what happened to the case. From everything I've read, he's got a small cult going on in rural South Carolina.

AND, that was the SECOND time. I think whoever it is who pays for his broadcasts ($100K a month) probably made his bail too.

Now there's a question I've always wondered about. The guy buys massive amounts of time on just about every American shortwave broadcaster in the country, and that has to cost big $$. Where does the leader of a small cult get his hands on that kind of dough?

WRMI in Florida would have to shut down half their transmitters were it not for Brother Scare spewing his nonsense on the air. WBCQ in Maine is spending lots of money upgrading to a new Continental transmitter and some fancy new antenna farm, and I think Bro. Stair is their biggest paying customer, too.

I think the WBCQ upgrade is totally financed by another religious group. Its an Alliss antenna which is popular in Europe but this will be the first one in the US.

Getting back on-topic, WWV will not be shutting down in 2019 as once feared, and is making plans to celebrate its 100th anniversary. More info here.
-Adam

Great news there, Adam! Thanks for posting the link.

Indeed! Looks like “atomic” watches and clocks here will continue to be accurate, and the signals that I use for a quick check of SW band conditions and calibration will continue. :)

jr

Yay! WWV not dead! I've been setting my watches from them since the 1980's Some of my friends over the years have asked me "do you know what time it is?" my reply, Yes, I really do!

Good news indeed. I actually bought a Citizen eco-drive wristwatch last week that adjusts every night from WWV, so there is a need for that station other than us radio guys.

My thing was with CHU, the time station up in Canuckistan... For SOME strange reason, it came in AMAZINGLY well down here in Greater Bugtussle. And, it rather completely MESMERISED a rather weird 11,12 yr old kid w/only a cheapy Grundig. My dad made the misteak of taking me to Bondurant Bros Co in Knoxville, they were the Sony distributor here in NE Tenn, I stole a catalog of all their SW radios, & NOTHING would do until Santy Claws brung me a CRF-230 that year.... 1969 was a GREAT year... But is it just me, or do "Time" stations have a rather hypnotic spell that they can weave ?. Beep, Beep, beep, beep....The time is twelve hours, seventeen minutes, Eastern standard time...

Oh yes, I remember Bondurant Bros very well. Back in the day, they were the closest parts house to my shop so I would stop in occasionally. Unfortunately, they were on a downhill slide after Sony dropped distributors, and didn't make it through the 1990's. Their location down on Sevier Avenue is just a few miles from my house. The building is still there, and I read the other day there are plans to redevelop it.

Bondurant Bros had quite a collection of vintage service manuals in stock, lots of old Sams and even Rider's. I can't remember the guys name in the parts dept, but when I was a kid, he was nice enough to Xerox copies for me every now and then.

For an electronics infatuated redneck kid, as I was-and STILL am, just now I'm an electronics infatuated Olde Pharte', going to Bondurant's was akin to getting to go to God's Office or something. Well, maybe not quite THAT good, but pretty dern close. The staff was friendly, they knew their stuff about what they sold, & were INFINATELY patient w/annoying electronics infatuated kids. I knew 2 guys who worked there-An older guy named Leon-Whose last name escapes me- & Doug Ivey, who was likely in his thirties back in the late 60s-early 70s when I knew him. Leon was sort of a little guy, I remember towering over him when I was 11, 12, 13. Doug was taller, prolly a good 6' or more. Funny how you remember things like that almost 50 yrs later. I DO remember asking them which kind of VCR I should buy ? back in '79 or 80, & they told me "VHS"-they saw a lot less of them than sick Betamaxes. I also remember seeing a Sony branded COLOR set about a year B4 the Trinitron came out in one of the offices in the back of the Bondurant bldg. It looked like a std USA type 21" tabletop color set, but it said "Sony" on it. Wish now I'd gone into my "Young Sheldon" mode & asked questions about it...From all I've read/heard about Sony, slapping their name on an RCA, Zenith, or Admiral would have been anathema to them...

I never bought anything from Bondurant Bros. except for parts. We were a Zenith dealer (which was distributed by Graybar and then Cain & Bultman on 17th street) and Quasar and Crosley (which was EB Copeland and then Consumer Wholesale on Jackson Ave). We tried selling Sharp, but the shipping costs were too high. We also carried a little Magnavox stuff as they had a distributor down in Cleveland, TN.

Our biggest parts supplier was L&S Electronics, from up your way in Morristown. The only game left in town for parts these days is Shields.

Interesting. I have a 17-19" Setchell Carlson industrial color Monitor that is really professionally badged Sony up front (with the amount of rust and neglect that had to be done VERY long ago to look as original as it does)...There's a chance they might have ordered a bigger table set too...I figure mine was probably to demonstrate experimental color videotape systems to trade shows or sales reps in the USA.

There is a thread on it somewhere here on VK if you poke around.

Yes thankfully they had enough people sign for it not to go!!!!!!!