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Comment by breput | Hacker News Reader

This, along with the WWVB station[0] that makes most of your "atomic" wall clocks work, is an underappreciated national (and international) resource that was almost shut down recently[1] due to budget cuts.

I'm not going to link directly to any of them because of the Hacker News hug of death, but do a web search for "websdr", find a US based or nearby location, and try tuning to either 5000 kHz, 10000 kHz, or 15000 kHz (depending on the time of day - lower frequencies are usually better at night), AM mode, to listen in.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB

[1] https://cqnewsroom.blogspot.com/2019/03/wwv-funding-restored...

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Or just buy a shortwave radio! They are still made, and a high quality shortwave antenna for receiving purposes is simply a length of wire, as long as possible, and as high as possible.

The shortwave band (also known as “HF” radio) is a fascinating introduction to the subject, and while it is no longer full of long-range commercial radio stations, the propagation characteristics of the band mean it is still useful for things like WWV and amateur radio communication.

If you live on the west coast, you can enjoy the pleasure of receiving both WWV (broadcast from Colorado) and WWVH (broadcast from Hawaii) at the same time, on the same frequency. Their voice announcements are intentionally offset so that they never overlap.

If you have one of the popular RTL-SDR's you may be able to pick up the HF bands by enabling the direct sampling mode (allows tuning between 500kHz - 28.8MHz).

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-blog-v-3-dongles-user-guide/

NIST was the one that proposed closing the WWVs as a means of getting attention (and their full ask) during the 2019 budget negotiations. The good ol "Washington Monument" strategy.

This reminds me of the first true atomic wristwatch[1].

[1] http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/

Yeah, I dunno, putting a hedge-fund manager at the head of the Commerce Department that is in charge of the national standards labs...

One of those times when Congress should have had the courage to say, "No, Donny," but didn't.

I prefer someone with knowledge of finance being the head of a department very heavily involved in finance. Whether or not the particular person was the right guy is a determination I personally wouldn't make on his job alone.

There's a vast gulf of knowledge in between a hedge funder famous for vulture capital restructuring and someone capable of effectively and prudently running a government department.

It's like saying "I prefer someone technical managing my mainframe" after appointing a web designer to the role.

I would literally have more faith in someone who had served as treasurer at a large church running the Commerce Department compared to someone like 83-year old Wilbur Ross.

Hard to justify the utility of the WWVB station with the coexistence of 4 going on 5 independent GPS systems along with telephone/cellular and internet systems. Pull is preferable over push given the use is not to be a canary; jamming a single time source is not strategically relevant. If it was there would be security at the station, but as is in a residential area some one could walk up with a power tool and take it down.

> Hard to justify the utility of the WWVB station with the coexistence of 4 going on 5 independent GPS systems.

All those GNSS systems use the same frequencies that can easily be jammed:

* https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/index.php/GNSS_signal

Even the US government themselves recognizes the importance of resiliency:

* https://insidegnss.com/dot-report-on-backup-pnt-technologies...

* https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/us-dot-releases...

You may have arrived at this view due to lack of visibility on what WWV does.

WWV also provides: - stable reference frequencies for maritime and aviation radio and also for terrestrial radio tuning - space weather alerting for radio system operators - GPS system status updates for maritime and aviation - High accuracy intervals and UT1 corrections (which used in conjunction with GPS for highly accurate position measurements)

Despite sounding like some legacy thing, this is a highly active system used by a lot of folks. I built a stratum 1 NTP system for power grid a few years ago using EndRun high accuracy appliances and we used GPS and WWV as the sources.

https://tf.nist.gov/stations/iform.html

The reference frequency part is very important. There is a lot of test gear that relies on a 10 MHz signal for calibration.

Very accurate reference frequencies can be obtained by syncing an oscillator to a GPS receiver clock output (0). I'm however all for maintaining traditional shortwave (not just time and frequency) radio stations on, for being much easier to receive and harder to control by governments.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_disciplined_oscillator

Shutting it down would have made every single existing radio controlled clock e-waste, overnight. And not just random wristwatches and wall clocks, but school and industrial clocks. None of these will work with GNSS signals.

That's the point, to stop creating this e-waste. If those applications are critical, then the owners should never have bought vulnerable radio controlled clocks in the first place.

Your assertion doesn’t even make sense. The hardware (wall clocks) could be older than gps. And gps is not only more expensive to receive, it’s harder too (most of those clocks would be indoors).

And the wwv signal is far more robust than gps.

Radio clocks are vulnerable to signal loss and spoofing regardless if it is GPS, cellular, or HF. If the time accuracy is critical, then the time signal should be delivered by wire to device, especially indoors. Wall clocks should have a manual way to set the clocks given there has never been a guarantee to receive the WWV signal. If expense is the concern along with wireless capability, then an integrated 2.4GHz SoC could be used that costs pennies; https://www.beaglesoft.com/radsynreceiver.htm appears to cost hundreds.

Well of course you can’t design against every eventuality, just the most likely.

> If expense is the concern, ... costs pennies.

I don’t suppose you’ve ever worked on a product where a couple of pennies would sink the BOM. Not to mention antenna design and cost.

One system is land based. The others are space based.

The world needs redundancy especially in the presence of solar flares that can knock out satellites.

Yes, we could have a partial backup to a 1.7 Billion/Year program for less than 0.007 Billion per year, but no.. that's too expensive?

Any program cost has to be evaluated with respect to its benefits, even if it insignificant in face of most government spending. The question is if the cost to have this backup to synchronize time over radio to increase the reliability within Broadcast Outage limits of WWV is less than the costs that would occur due to time drift with all of the existing systems being unavailable given their expected reliability.

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