What Closing a Government Radio Station Would Mean for Clocks | Hacker News Reader

What Closing a Government Radio Station Would Mean for Clocks

voanews.com

159 pointsMagicPropmaker118 comments

WWV, WWVH, and WWVB are more than charity for timekeepers. They distribute time and frequency, traceable to a national standard, for one leg of "positioning, navigation, and timing."

Before GPS and the internet, numerous services depended on those signals. I would argue that now, we have positioning, navigation, and timing from multiple satellite systems (and a phone network providing excellent time & freq references derived from satellites). We have internet time synced to atomic standards and satnav. All of the modern references are more precise, accurate, and stable than WWV, WWVH, and WWVB.

As to devices which sync from WWVB, there are gadgets which can get GPS time and transmit an LF signal for syncing those devices. No problems, ladies and gents, you've still got time.

I made one of these GPS -> WWVB simulators a couple years ago. There's a short write-up here, in case anyone is interested in reading about it: https://www.anishathalye.com/2016/12/26/micro-wwvb/

There are also some neat iPhone apps that use the audio circuitry to produce a low-power signal that can be picked up by radio-controlled clocks that are close by: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clock-wave/id1073576068?mt=8

A couple people mentioned the FCC and licensing issues in the comments below. As far as I know, as long as you're transmitting at a very low power (40 µV/m as measured at 300m), it's okay. This should be fine for personal use, but won't work on a municipal level.

Not bad! While reading the article the thought occurred that if WWV were eliminated then this would be a good opportunity for a smart phone app to pipe a GPS derived time standard emulating WWV format into a < 100mw (Part 15) 5, 10, or 15 MHz attached transmitter. And the idea was already objectified.

Dude! That's freaking awesome. I've been wanting to set up a GPS-based NTP server for a while, but haven't gotten around to it yet. I'll have to read through and take a look at the transmitting equipment you used; adding WWVB to it would be awesomesauce.

The Russians still equip their navy with shortwave. There’s a reason for that.

In any sort of conflict, GPS will be gone in hours.

The services you described as being dependent on these stations cannot necessarily be upgraded to use internet or satellite time.

There may be an interesting market not only for simulated WWVB but WWV / WWVH if someone absolutely needs to sync from HF. Those HF signals are notoriously unstable in phase, so a locally simulated signal may actually be better.

Here's an example of work on simulating WWVB, not yet in mass production:

https://sites.google.com/site/wayneholder/controlling-time.

He could use a precision frequency source if a precise 60 kHz was absolutely necessary.

I’m not sure what you mean by “locally simulated”. If I need to run this in my house, I now need to deal with a new device when my wall clock would have continued to work by itself before. If this needs to be done at the city level, then I now need to depend on someone providing a municipal service that needs to work consistently and reliably, which I am less confident that a city can run over the federal government (though, considering this incident, maybe I’m misguided?)

There’s also the licensing issue. You can’t just start broadcasting on that frequency. The FCC would have to assign it to you, or start up a licensing scheme.

If the lawmakers were smart, they would make an explicit allowance for micropower transmitters on those frequencies in perpetuity. I wouldn't get my hopes up though.

It's not the phase stability that's important, but the accuracy and drift over time.

Local service for houses or buildings could be provided service with limited power signals under rules for low power devices / FCC Part 15. Yes, you would need hardware to get your satnav (or mobile phone) signals and create the replacements for your LF/MF/HF dependent devices.

You have to ask yourself, "Where is the point of diminishing returns in retaining dependency on signals like WWV / WWVH?"

By the way eLoran will probably be the terrestrial back up for GNSS based position / navigation / timing. Also, if we get to the geopolitical state of satellites being destroyed, there will be a truckload of larger problems to worry about.

Any nation with the hubris to destroy GNSS birds deserves the nukes they suffer in return. Any nation who lets it happen, because the leader is numbnutted, deserves to suffer a breakdown for not being more mature in managing its geopolitical situation.

Fifth Risk indeed.

Is eLORAN still actually happening in the US? Since we shut down our LORAN transmitters a few years ago, I assumed the plans for eLORAN went out the window with it.

AFIK, everything is going to GPS and ADS-B.

I would buy one in a heartbeat if true. I moved and neither of my watches (one Citizen and one Seiko) can get the Colorado signal anymore from the Northeast USA. But as other posters point out, I cannot imagine the FCC would allow those devices. But, OTOH, the propagation characteristics of any small device/antenna running at 60kHz would be abysmally bad and perhaps unworthy of notice. I would still not bet my several FCC licenses on it though.

Do any of these satellite systems work inside a building without running antennae to the roof?

Window antennas work fairly well, but a roof mounted antenna / preamp is far more reliable.

> WWV is the oldest continuously operating radio station in the United States. It's been on the air since 1920. It's signal provides a frequency standard for receivers. The time stamp is regulated by an atomic clock. But a 2019 budget proposal for NIST would close WWV, WWVH in Hawaii and WWVB, which syncs up the time for about 50 million radio-controlled clocks, wristwatches and appliances.

Classic example of the government providing a pure utility, a utility with no profit motive, which private enterprise could never justify.

Not to mention it's impossible to even charge for this service. I guess you could encrypt the stream, but a single key leak compromises everything (unless you assume devices are connected to the internet, which defeats the purpose of the system).

Satellite TV providers manage to make it work: each receiver has its own key in a smartcard, and the master key which encrypts the broadcast is gradually distributed to each receiver over the same radio channel. The master key is changed often, so leaking it once is not enough.

Look at Sirius XM for a good reason world approach to this problem. It's not 100% foolproof but they manage to charge for the service well enough.

Don’t we have satellites broadcasting super accurate time, now?

We do. GPS is actually more accurate. That said...

1. GPS requires a clear line of sight to the sky. Doesn't work for indoor clocks.

2. Shortwave receivers are more energy efficient.

3. Redundancy is a good thing. Just in case GPS (or your receiver) has a problem.

4. WWV isn't just time. It also serves as a frequency reference for radio stations. It also transmits marine weather alerts, space weather (solar flares, etc.), and GPS system health updates. (Though apparently the marine weather notices are being discontinued in Jan 2019.)

WWVB was a better reference due to surface wave propagation, but they added phase modulation which broke it as a frequency standard.

I have a wall clock that syncs from WWVB. It was pretty cheap and uses a single AA battery (which seems to last forever). I never have to update the time.

Can satellite time provide an equivalent or better solution here?

Anyone who has ever installed a GPS backed NTP appliance in a data center can quickly answer that.

For those who haven’t: it involves drilling holes in the roof of your data center for a satellite antenna.

doesn't the wall work just as well?

No, as I explain here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rfelectronics/comments/6nb6ky/do_ce...

To get halfway decent holdover performance, you want all the precision you can get when the constellation is good. That requires the best skyview (and least multipath) you can manage.

You can see only about half the sky that way, which means usually getting almost as good a fix as with a roof mount antenna. For best results, you want the satellites to be as far apart as possible in the sky (measured by angle from your position, not miles between them). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_of_precision_(navigat... .

If you mainly care about time and can tolerate a few microseconds of error, usually being able to see 4 satellites might well be enough.

I remember seeing a gps receiver designed just for time that could maintain sync using only one satellite (it assumed that it was bolted to an immovable object, and it might have needed to see 4 satellites at once at some point).

GPS requires line of sight to the satellites.

And walls have two sides...

So all your clocks need to be on outside walls?

No, but all your satellites would.

GPS could yes. Don’t know how many exist but would only add a few dollars in chips.

We have them, until we don't.

Terrestrial AM Shortwave is super robust. And there is a ton of gear out there depending on it.

The cost of the cut will be orders more than any savings.

Worse, it will probably be turned right back on the moment saner heads prevail.

Shortwave generally has much better propagation characteristics though buildings than gps.

Satellites yes, and mobile phone infrastructure derives time and frequency from GNSS.

Courtesy of the US government.

No. There are examples in the past with privately financed lighthouses which people think of as public good. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/109114210730218...

I set my analog watch to WWV every couple of days.

I'm in California, so I can actually hear both signals at the same time (one from Colorado, one from Hawaii). You can tell which signal is which by the gender of the announcer. Pretty cool stuff.

It will be a very sad day for radio if it is discontinued.

In the current solar minimum, sometimes it's the only station I can pull in on my shortwave receiver :-/ It will be sad to see another SW station go off-air. There's still plenty of fun to be had in other modes and bands though.

>WWV, the oldest continuously operating radio station in the United States, first went on the air from Washington in 1919.... >The station subsequently was moved to Maryland and then to Colorado in 1966....

So, for it to be continuously operating, at some point, there would have been two transmitters operating. I wonder what the logistics of that would be like. Have both operating until it is validated that the 2nd/new one is working, and then shut down the first/old one? Do you just flip the switch on the old one, or do you start to lower the power output of the first one so that equipment picks up the second/new signal before ultimately turning it off. Essentially, it would be similar to running multiple APs on a wi-fi network I'd imagine.

That's the stuff that makes me interested. There's no "maintenance" mode. It's all done live while hot type of stuff.

I didn't read "continuously operating" as zero down time, more that there have been continued efforts and interest in operating it. No real idea though.

This. Continuously operating means a very different thing to a hacker than to the general populace. :)

Sounds like these aren't quite atomic clock level accurate so maybe a switch over is feasible. Other commenter said he can receive two stations so maybe not continuous in same freq?

The article says they are based on atomic clocks, but there is bound to be some variability from a radio signal traveling long distances.

All three radio stations (Washington, Maryland, and Colorado) used atomic clocks.

Presumably they could handle the radio hand-off very precisely. ;)

But actually--the precision of an atomic clock (nanoseconds) is orders of magnitude higher than lag due to radio wave travel (many microseconds). And even if you account for this, you probably only know your distance from the atomic clock to within 10 meters, which is tens of nanoseconds of uncertainty.

When the Japanese JJY station shut down because of the tsunami, some people made signal generators using audio signals eg http://jjy.831337.xyz/ Would something similar be possible for WWVB?

Although I consider this a crisis, I assume NIST put WWV on the chopping block for the same reasons your local town puts the libraries and parks on the chopping block first, followed by one fire station: visibility and, though I don't like the word, "pain".

There's plenty of important but not sexy work going on (research into the kg, cryptography research, etc) that congress and the taxpayer might happily throw overboard (local equivalent to, say, fixing that bridge or surveying all gas lines for leaks -- "haven't found any yet so why not skip a year?").

This is a canary of a far more fundamental problem.

And yes: the existence of stratum 0 sources like GPS does nothing to alleviate the need for RF sources like WWV, any more than GPS removed the need for LORAN-C, the decommissioning of which is now recognized as a serious mistake.

How expensive could it possibly be to keep this running?

US gov isn't exactly poornad debating this probably cost more than just continuing

$26 million a year. It’s in the article.

That's the total cut. Cost of the stations isn't in the article. Reading around it appears to be ~6.3 million.

Turning off stuff like this is beyond stupid. Satellites are pretty freaking fragile. China has tested destroying them and has done so with their own pretty easily. A high altitude nuke would be pretty devastating too, and you don't need the nuke to survive re-entry to be effective (hello North Korea, Iran and others or government probably doesn't want to acknowledge as easily capable of such an attack).

We pile all our eggs into single, fragile technological baskets at our peril. Dumbasses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbs7uLUPZ8

Are moving satellites in space easier to take out than a stationary antenna in Colorado?

Probably. Colorado has defenses. A large-scale ICBM attack would get through, but bombers or a small ICBM attack wouldn’t.

Huh? I just did the first step of any intelligence gathering, and looked it up on Google maps. It's an unguarded dirt road off of an FM country-style 2 lane road. It's not even blurred out, for you know, security reasons. You could practically drive right up to the transmitter/antenna, and take it out with what ever crude/rudimentary method you chose including just driving your truck into it. You could probably buy a couple of local yocals enough beer/whiskey to convince them it would be a fun thing to use the building for target practice. It's a super soft target. By the time anyone could figure out that the transmitter was offline, and then decide to actually send a crew out to investigate, the attackers could already be on a plane to wherever. ICBM attacks are something that is closely watched with early-warning satellites, and have automatic response procedures.

That sort of attack would result in minor damage and it would be quickly fixed. To permanently destroy the transmitter would require blowing it up, and NORAD will make that difficult.

I think you have too much faith in NORAD. Shoot, do it on Christmas, they're too busy tracking Santa.

NORAD isn't going to notice a truck loaded with explosives doing the speed limit on a road that is perfectly legal for it to be on. You're over complicating the level of attack required. Think guerilla style. I've been to TV/Radio antenna farms. They are not reinforced anything. There's a pad lock on a chain securing a chain link fence gate. They are sheet metal structures around the equipment for the sole purpose of keeping the equipment out of the elements. Even if you don't take out the transmitter, taking out the antenna would also suffice. The antenna structures are super vulnerable. If a 1500' tower collapses, it takes a bit of time to get it back up once the parts&pieces have been gathered and assembled at the site. Here's a list of how non-intended accidents involving antenna structures[0], so imagine someone that intends to do harm. At this point, I'm concerned what my Google search history might lead one to suspect. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_catastrophic_collapses...

WWV "server" for the service could be rapidly restored from any site in the same general area. There are almost certainly spares for all the equipment, and most of it isn't even specific to the application. What matters is the protocol and widely deployed receive stations (which would be very hard to change).

If there were local agents with a truck of explosives, there would be way, way more valuable targets to attack though.

That depends entirely on the plot of the movie. If it’s a terrorist thing, then yeah it’s probably going to be a shopping mall, sporting event or similar. If it’s an opening salvo to take out “key” infrastructure clearing the way for a larger something later, then it’s perfect.

There is no point in an ICBM attack nowadays if it is not large scale, so if it happens you can count on 99% chance that your defenses will not be effective.

And in the event of a large-scale ICBM attack, keeping accurate time will be the least of your troubles.

Yes. I was going to make that point as well, but I guess the previous comment was kind of hyperbolic.

Does it matter? The attack vectors are orthogonal, requiring a linear increase of resources. For something like a clock sync source, it might not be worth it for the attacker.

Killing zero people versus killing x {x>1} is a very different calculus for an attacker.

Regarding collateral damage and/or political fallout? Yeah, probably.

The antenna in Colorado is considerably easier to replace.

NTP ?

I've not been able to find out why this is being cut.

By destroying a civil service manned service permanently, they open the door for some shitty contractor to take over at 10x cost.

Rick Santorum was always down on the NWS providing weather data to the public... as his pals were the people who own Accuweather.

Even working for a govt contractor, I don't get the impetus to get rid of federal employees and hire contractors at 10x the price. Ive talked with one of my colleagues who came from federal, and said if you call an agency, 95% of them are actually contractors. Even the OMB and clearance work is done by primarily contractors. The fact that we outsource our security apparatus blows my mind.

I mean, sure there is corruption, which should be charged appropriately. (To be honest, I like how the Chinese handle corrupt govt officials - get hauled out in the public streets, and shot. I don't like how they dont get a fair trial.)

That's the only way to bypass government pay scales.

So in other words, it sounds like a Peter Principle but applied to government pay control.

The incompetent ones stay with government because they couldn't get a job in corporate, and are stuck with low pay and (usually) stability. Well, except for furloughs.

Whereas contractors take the "squeeze'em till they squeal" approach and get paid much much more.

It always made me wonder why when the govt takes the lowest bidder, and it has all sorts of riders and exceptions to charge a pile of money more... Why does the government accept that arrangement, instead of saying "Nope, you should have calculated that in your costs." If there was an answer, I'd have to say 'incompetence'.

I have not worked for the feds, but have spent time in state/local government. Basically the perception of conflict or impropriety drives the process.

Additionally, random process gets bolted on by outside parties (legislature, external compliance, procurement regulation authority within the executive) and creates delay and policies of questionable value. Each thing is not necessarily a bad thing individually, but add up to a nightmare process in many cases.

It’s not incompetence, it’s a different perception of success. A government procurement officer views success as meeting compliance requirements, and then competing in price. Compliance matters more as the procurement folks face nasty audits or even prosecution if there’s an issue.

The same stupidity happens in corporate procurement, but doesn’t make the news because it isn’t public. When I sold stuff to a fortune 50 company in college, they would roll random shit like pencils, toilet paper and chairs into capital equipment leases to goose the books.

Probably for the same reason as any other low-savings cut in a Republican administration. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist#2001

The entire NIST budget is pretty large. This is one of the most visible things they do. By threatening to cut this if their budget shrinks, perhaps they're hoping to preserve their original budget request.

That's a realistic story in light of how Sesame Street, one of PBS's most profitable (and absolutely self-sustaining) franchises, was used to campaign against budget cuts back in the day. If the NIST head was a completely unscrupulous government agent (not making any accusations of course) then it would clearly be in their interest to only offer to cut valuable high-profile programs, burying their cut-able pet projects as deeply as possible. That would be the strategy that minimized the political will to cut the budget.

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/big-bir...

This will not fly in Turkey, as Turkish constitution applies the previous term's budget inflation adjusted if legistlature fails to approve the budget in time.

I'm guessing it's a similar reason that church bells aren't carefully budgeted for to keep the town running. Do you use WWV?

I run a casio waveceptor watch. It is accurate to within half a second of what the local tv uses for broadcast time and seeing as I am involved in a live broadcast then yes i do need that accuracy weekly.

I use WWV (or more accurately, WWVB) to automatically set my Casio Navihawk watch, as well as my digital wall clocks.

I also rely on WWV as a beacon to make sure my HF amateur radio station is receiving properly.

I picked up a USN ship's wall clock synchronized by WWV at a ham radio swap meet several years ago. Much of my day is spent in the workshop and this is the only way I keep aware of the time.

Do you stand here and claim that people don’t use it?

I wonder if a university could take over the entire thing and continue to provide the service.

NIST provides a standard way to introduce leap seconds, I believe. What alternatives are there for this? (One proposal eliminates leap seconds.)

$26m does seem a little steep with today's technology. That probably includes the price of being nuke proof... I'm guessing if we're merely worried about sprinklers watches and clocks we could let that level of hardening go

The stations are 6m. 26m is the total proposed cut, which also cuts atmospheric monitoring and more. This is a terrible idea. NIST is really, really useful.

Thanks for the correction, I guess I didn't read closely enough.

I still think this could be replaced an ran somewhat reliably for less than $1m/year. Considering you can get a 27mhz cb radio for $10, making something with one or two nines of uptime shouldn't be very expensive.

It has to be able to reach the coasts from Colorado. The current one is a 70 kW transmitter. That's higher than the majority of commercial AM/FM radio broadcast stations. You do have to know your way around that stuff to not get cooked.

Its a budget cutback but it reads as if those in charge at NIST are threatening to shut off WWV and their clocks rather than cut research funding.

They should simply reduce research and keep the clocks running.

I remember when we used to have the POP-CORN number to check the time.

We changed the URL from https://www.npr.org/2018/08/25/641835302/what-closing-a-gove... to the one that was submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18755285. It seems to be the more substantial article.

Analog AM/FM should be the next to go.

what?

Seconded. Just watch any movie of a World War/Doomsday/Zombie Apocalypse level event occurs. The people get information via radio. They don't plug into the internet. The internet may no longer be there. This might be hard to imagine for the younger generations, as they've not known to not have the internet. Radios are very effective for broadcasting "pirate" signals, and are pretty easy to receive as well. It would not be that hard to MacGyvre a crystal radio together. It used to be everybody's first "learn electronics" project. You can even do it from non-digital equipment. Analog signals are "cool" in their low-tech abilities. Here's an example video of how low-tech you can go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqdcU9ULAlA

> Just watch any movie of a World War/Doomsday/Zombie Apocalypse level event occurs. The people get information via radio.

You know these are fictional, right? They're made up. You can't observe a work of fiction and judge from that what people will do in a given situation.

Digital is robust too - you can run mesh networks of phones and wifi equipment.

Hams have a rep for mostly holding on to ancient technology, but they have demonstrated wideband microwave mesh networking with off the shelf hardware and lower bandwidth HF networking. Those goodies are more effective than the CW and SSB depictions in movies.

Digital requires being able to decode the transmission once received. That takes a bit of work on the receiving side that an analog signal would not. Digital has a lot of advantages, but in my opinion the single greatest advantage to analog is its simplicity. Just like an analog vinyl record. Put a pencil in the center hole to spin it, a sewing needle taped perpendicular to a piece of paper rolled into a cone and you have a decoder/player. This is the reason the Library of Congress archives audio to vinyl over any other format.

There are times when "best" isn't the best option.

> they have demonstrated wideband microwave mesh networking with off the shelf hardware.

That's academic if you don't happen to be close to a suitably stocked shelf in an emergency situation. As has been pointed out in other posts, simple analog gear can be improvised using basic and easily obtained components.

The current fashion for getting rid of low-tech backups for important infrastructure reminds me of the Titanic: the ship is "unsinkable" so why not get rid of most of the lifeboats?

Somehow, I expect a crystal radio will survive an EMP that fries every P-N junction in a digital device... That's robust. Crystal radios don't even need batteries.

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

While at it - make the mesh a blockchain one...

Seems like these stations are a novelty for just about everyone. Kind of like candle-lit dinners. You can turn the LED lights to low, but real candles are cool. Or LPs... pretty cool indeed. But those novelties don't rely on the government to make sure candles are made and LPs of popular albums are available.

Novelties? Plenty of building time clocks use this as it penetrates walls better than GPS (not to mention it's cheaper to both operate and use)

Replacing the existing infrastructure which uses these signals will be much more expensive and time consuming than anybody realizes.

You can use the stars to set time too: https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Navigation/ESA_sets_clock...

To claim that the two radio stations in Colorado and Hawaii are our last grasp on time is a bit of a stretch.

There are legacy systems in existence that rely on those stations, but none really seem particularly critical or that can't be easily moved over to something more modern than church bells.

Not many stars in the middle of a building. Radio time isn't our last grasp on time but it is an efficient grasp that has been proven to work damn near everywhere for cheap.

Old != obsolescent and you don't automatically save money by turning something currently in use off you have to look at the cost to remove or replace it in all use cases.

If you’d care to read the article it wouldn’t seem that way anymore.

I can think of a number of viable business models. It has a strong following without any marketing, and surrounding industries rely on tech for radio controlled clocks etc.

Private industry could easily profitably operate it, however the core technology - the atomic cloc - is nuclear weapon grade technology, which is simply unavailable to anyone but the government.

Not true. You can buy a rubidium atomic clock module for a little under $2K: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14830. I believe cheaper options are also available.

Cheapest I was able to find quickly is $1107.23: https://www.mouser.com/Search/Refine.aspx?Keyword=rubidium

Atomic clocks show up on surplus auctions/stores somewhat frequently (they’re called a Caesium frequency standard, e.g. the HP 5071). There’s a few reports of enthusiasts keeping them running at home (http://leapsecond.com/ptti2003/tvb-Amateur-Timekeeping-2003....)

I’m sure HP/Agilent/others will gladly sell you the newer state of the art modes as well (although as high precision, very low volume devices they’ll be fabulously expensive); if an industry consortium wants even more precision you could staff a research team and shave off a bit more frequency error.

However, I think for industry it’s cheaper to use GPS receivers instead of supporting a powerful transmitter (and its use of value able spectrum). GPS can keep incredibly accurate time.

"GPS can keep incredibly accurate time."

Sure, as long as the satellites are up and you have line of sight.

Aside from hostile actors, space debris, solar storms and other threats exist. We shouldn't take for granted that our satellites are just always going to be there.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-all-our-satelli...

I've worked at private companies where we've had cesium atomic clocks in the lab. I've owned a rubidium atomic clock. I'm not saying that shutting down WWVB/WWVH/WWV isn't foolish, but atomic clocks are readily available to anyone who wants to pay. Cesium is high five figures and rubidium is often available for under $1,000.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com