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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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