[CQ-Contest] WWVB: What time is it? You mean now?

[donovanf at starpower.net]

Hi Maarten 


This is an exact quote from page NIST 25 of the proposed FY2019 NIST budget: 



< www.osec.doc.gov/bmi/budget/FY19CBJ/NIST_and_NTIS_FY2019_President 's_Budget_for_508_comp.pdf> 
"NIST will discontinue the dissemination of the U.S. time and frequency via the NIST radio stations in Hawaii and Ft. Collins, CO. These radio stations transmit signals that are used to synchronize consumer electronic products like wall clocks, clock radios, and wristwatches, and may be used in other applications like appliances, cameras, and irrigation controllers." 
73 
Frank 
W3LPL 
----- Original Message -----

From: "Maarten van R" <pd2r.maarten at gmail.com> 
To: ktfrog007 at aol.com 
Cc: kdutson at sbcglobal.net, cq-contest at contesting.com 
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2018 7:25:26 PM 
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] WWVB: What time is it? You mean now? 

This tread was originally only about WWV and WWVH, no mention of WWVB was 
made. Reading the article again it says “NIST shutting down radio stations 
in Colorado and Hawaii”. For some reason the ARRL article doesn’t mention 
the WWVB signal which is also transmitted from CO. 
If the WWVB signal is also terminated, that would surely cause some radio 
controled clock owners to become very unhappy. 
Fortunately I live in the Netherlands, right between the DCF77 signal from 
Germany and the MSF signal from the UK ;-) 

73, Maarten PD2R/OV2T 


Op do 23 aug. 2018 om 20:44 schreef <ktfrog007 at aol.com> 

> According to an article in Wikipedia there are over 50 million radio 
> clocks and wrist watches that use WWVB. There's bound to be a handful of 
> unhappy campers in that group if WWVB goes QRT. 
> 
> I have one of the wrist watches and have used it in recent years to verify 
> that my WSJT-X timing (from Dimension4) is on the money. However, it uses 
> an obscure watch battery I used to buy at Radio Shack (SK). My battery 
> died recently and the watch is just sitting on my desk, dead by association. 
> 
> Here's something about WWVB that maybe some more knowledgeable person can 
> verify. It transmits a ground wave signal (which follows the earth's 
> surface) at 60 kHz, a very low frequency, and covers a wide area with no 
> skip zones like the higher frequency WWV sky wave stations. I assume the 
> path from it to me is a great circle path of constant distance (also 
> considering terrain. bodies of water, etc) from which I could make a 
> latency correction to get the most accurate time. 
> 
> You can't do this with the sky wave stations via the fluctuating 
> ionosphere. 
> 
> My wrist watch's manual warns that the signal is weakest during the 
> daylight hours and there are some areas of the US where reception is poor 
> (East Coast, the Los Angles basin). It resets during the night, after 
> midnight for me. I had to take it off every evening and set it on a wooden 
> window sill, its plastic case broadside to Ft Collins, CO, to get 
> consistent resets. If I did that it worked well and always correlated with 
> Dimension4 and the WWV stations. 
> 
> WWV and WWVB have been part of the sound track of my life ever since I got 
> interested in radio. But so were Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and Johnny 
> Cash, and they went away, too. 
> 
> 73, 
> Ken, AB1J 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message----- 
> From: Maarten van R <pd2r.maarten at gmail.com> 
> To: Keith Dutson <kdutson at sbcglobal.net> 
> Cc: Cq-Contest <cq-contest at contesting.com> 
> Sent: Wed, Aug 22, 2018 9:38 pm 
> Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] WWV and WWVH may go off the air. 100, 000 
> signatures needed by Sept. 15th. 
> 
> I know that Casio watches use WWVB’s signal from Fort Collins CO. If I’m 
> not mistaken, most radio controlled clocks use this 60 kHz frequency which 
> is much better for this application then the 5, 10 and 15 MHz signals of 
> WWV and WWVH. So I doubt there will be many users of consumer electronics 
> that will be disappointed. 73, Maarten PD2R/OV2T 
> 
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