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Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408
Buried on page 25 of the 2019 budget proposal for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), under the heading "Fundamental Measurement, Quantum Science, and Measurement Dissemination", there's a short entry that has caused plenty of debate and even a fair deal of anger among those in the amateur radio scene:
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.
The NIST stations in Hawaii and Colorado are the home of WWV, WWVH, and WWVB. The oldest of these stations, WWV, has been broadcasting in some form or another since 1920; making it the longest continually operating radio station in the United States. Yet in order to save approximately $6.3 million, these time and frequency standard stations are potentially on the chopping block.
Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/08/20/what-will-you-do-if-wwvb-goes-silent/
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday August 27 2018, @10:19AM (25 children)
Phone [navy.mil] (US), (Australia) [smh.com.au] or NTP [ntp.org]?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @11:02AM (14 children)
Do we really want to connect these devices to the internet? Besides the fact that all existing devices that are dependent on these radio stations will cease to function properly, do we want clocks and irrigation systems connected to the internet?
Are we doing this to save money (and by save money, I mean pay for golf outings, parades for our illustrious leader, etc)?
(Score: 5, Informative) by MostCynical on Monday August 27 2018, @11:09AM (1 child)
About one year of the Secret Service's Mar-a-lago costs..
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-mar-lago-airfare-cost-taxpayers-6-million-2017-according-report-758877 [newsweek.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @11:23AM
ublox ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-blox [wikipedia.org] ) claims
I bought a few on ebay for about $10.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @11:12AM (6 children)
GPS time is accurate to a few nanoseconds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @11:22AM
We're going to get a Space Force partially because of threats to GPS. Woohoo!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @02:45PM (4 children)
So, do we retrofit all the existing devices to support GPS? And isn't GPS overkill for a device that does not need to keep track of its own location?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @03:35PM (1 child)
No. All gps is is extremely accurate time keeping/receiver + a small computer that solves a set of linear equations to determine where where you are based on time.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @04:22PM
Oh ... so yes, it is overkill.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Monday August 27 2018, @04:23PM (1 child)
No, there's really no such thing as "too accurate", but GPS doesn't each into all the locations that the HF signals coming from these stations do, so it's less functional overall. Plus it can't replace the functionality in existing devices that depend on the HF signals, of which there are many.
I consider terminating these services to be a very poor decision.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday August 27 2018, @09:06PM
...but GPS doesn't
eachreach into all the locations...Double-damn not being able to edit posts. 💩 !!!
(Score: 5, Informative) by martyb on Monday August 27 2018, @11:43AM (2 children)
There are literally millions of devices still in use, and still on sale, that make use of WWVB.
For example, here is a selection of radio-controlled watches from Seiko USA (Javascript required) [seikousa.com] and Citizen USA (91 models!) [citizenwatch.com]. New models are still being released. I don't know about you, but if I just dropped several hundred dollars on a new watch, which kept perfect time through synchronizing with the atomic clock signal broadcast on WWVB, and that time source went away, I'd be very unhappy.
Or, the watch that I bought a few years ago, and that has been keeping perfect time ever since, suddenly became inaccurate? Yeah, not a happy camper.
Let's hope it is just push back from the NIST selecting the most obvious, outcry-inducing candidate for a budget cut target so that they are able to resist having their budget squeezed.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by ShadowSystems on Tuesday August 28 2018, @04:07AM
I couldn't agree more or more strongly.
Being that I use atomic-signal-synching talking clocks to keep time, I'd be left with a house full of clocks that were suddenly rendered inaccurate & eventually worthless.
I'd be rather displeased if I have to go back to trying to manually setting clocks again, especially now that it takes so much freakin' longer to set each one.
=-\
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @02:59PM
Cynical career bureaucrats doing this again, you mean:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday August 27 2018, @05:56PM (1 child)
Complain all you want. I don't think you will change Vladimir's mind on this.
Everything in the US must be connected to the internet.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 28 2018, @12:12AM
Yup... all our eggs in one basket? Cool!
We are at a time of relative peace in the world right now... or at least peace in the view that no-one's taking potshots at USA.
I think we will be leaving ourselves awful vulnerable to a ton of pea gravel launched into an elliptical polar orbit should some small nation decide to "level the playing field" by rendering space useless to everyone... aka "poisoning the well". This is not a new paradigm...
I believe in redundancy. ( And my post may well be just that, as I haven't read the rest of 'em yet! ).
6 million? Hell, around here, Disney's gonna spend 100 million on a parking lot!
I will throw my hat into the ring on this one too.... Keep WWV on the air! There are way too many things out there which need it, and it serves for backup just in case something in space wipes out satellites as we know it... as I know good and well we get "meteor showers" every once in a while, who knows when we may encounter, in our travels through space, should we encounter a cloud of tiny particles from an ancient asteroid collision, or we be an unwilling target of a coronal ejection?
As important as time sync is these days, I don't wanna risk it to something that requires too complex of infrastructure. If we are ever faced with having to rebuild from the ground up, I want as much technology as possible to survive whatever it was that happened.
Our technology is the only thing thats gonna keep us from reverting to the stone age again.
For if we lose that, its only a matter of time before that which our fathers made deteriorates, and no one knows how to fix. You know, the meme of countless science fiction stories.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by drussell on Monday August 27 2018, @11:18AM
They also have very precise carrier frequencies that can be used as frequency standard references.
Yes, a GPSDO can provide you a great, stable reference, and you can get an accurate time synch from GPS but removing the broadcast time standards is a terribly silly thing to do to save a few bucks.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 27 2018, @02:07PM (8 children)
The whole point is that these are a wireless reference, no infrastructure required.
GPS would also be a very good argument as a replacement tech, but why cut off this very different redundant method to save the cost of a fraction of a GPS satellite?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @03:37PM (1 child)
Use Canada's broadcast then.
(Score: 3, Informative) by drussell on Monday August 27 2018, @05:39PM
I would hope that Canada will step up and start broadcasting on the old WWV frequencies if the USA decides to make the bone-headed move to discontinue their time service. CHU has always intentionally used different frequencies to not interfere with the operation of WWV.
Just saying "use the Canadian station" doesn't help the millions of installed devices that rely on WWV's current frequencies. CHU is also only broadcast from Ottawa and is not generally able to be received in a large part of western Canada and up north, even though the signal is intended to be able to reach worldwide.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday August 27 2018, @06:01PM (5 children)
The whole point is that by making you get the time signal from the intarweb tubes, they will have your IP address. Which probably is an IoT device. With the kind of security you've come to expect of IoT devices.
Using a shortwave transmission doesn't let the government know:
* how many people connect
* how often they connect
* where they are
* what kind of device is connecting
* what other devices are on your local network
* what can be seen from the various webcams in your home
* what color skin you might have
* whether that color is in fashion with the current administration
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 27 2018, @07:41PM (4 children)
Contrary to popular opinion, nobody can track you when you're using GPS.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by fyngyrz on Monday August 27 2018, @09:09PM (2 children)
...but they can track you using a GPS stuck to your whatever. Just saying.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday August 27 2018, @09:47PM
Even if you stick GPS to a different part of your body they can still track you.
Isn't GPS receive only? You would actually need GPS stuck to a device that then transmits your GPS location -- such as a cell phone. Or a module with both Iridium satellite transceiver AND GPS receiver, for instance.
Others here made a couple excellent points. Even a pure-GPS receiver may not work well or at all indoors, such as a household clock. A GPS receiver, even minimalist, is likely to not be capable of running for long periods, let alone skipping and jumping, on only a single AA battery.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 27 2018, @09:50PM
While true, in practice this is a lot less accurate than you would wish. If you've got an unlimited power source, then it can be pretty accurate most of the time, but the low power solutions have some serious granularity issues. Even "high accuracy" mode on a cellphone isn't much to brag about - you know the general area the person is in, but it's not like you could actually catch them on foot (at least not quickly or directly) with the info given by phone trackers.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 28 2018, @01:06AM
I would not make it so sure. I was reviewing datasheets and modern GPS chips are falling into these 3 categories:
1. Blatantly informing about GSM modems in it,
2. Being versions of chips from point 1 with modem functions "reduced" what is marked in datasheet.
3. Being GPS-only for first sight, but then you find that company makes a very similar chip with point 1.
So, generally, I would assume that someone who knows what is in these chips and how to launch it, can track.