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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @02:53PM (2 children)
Sure. I'm sure setting up dozens (hundreds?) of smaller transmitters will cost less than two large ones. And all existing devices lose calibration if they're not receiving the sync signals on the proper shortwave frequencies. And "manage a few hours/days without...".... reveals you don't understand. Once receiving the sync signal regularly they correct themselves automatically without intervention and effectively never go out of sync. (Unless you meant taking the time to resynchronize your device every few days to make it accurate again, which again shows you don't have the point.)
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday August 28 2018, @02:39PM (1 child)
It might; this is probably a $100 device, so you could build tens of thousands of the suckers. And if they're actually needed in that volume the price could certainly be reduced. Perhaps more importantly, then the cost will be paid by the minority that actually uses the service rather than being paid mostly by people who couldn't care less if it shuts down. The point isn't that this is a good replacement; the point is that it's a reasonable way to bridge the gap for the few people who might still have a legitimate need for that service (as well as the geeks who want to have it just because). If you personally have a single clock using this method of sync, it's probably better to just buy a less obsolete clock; if you have a school with a radio synced clock in each classroom then it's probably worth it to pay a couple hundred bucks to keep them synced.
Right. Same thing happens to my PC if it loses NTP sync. But that doesn't happen instantly, it happens over days/months/years depending on the build quality of the clock. And you can still set it manually if building your own transmitter is too much effort; alternatives are mostly going to be of use for organizations with a large deployment of these clocks.
I think I was pretty clear about what I meant there in the first place...maybe you missed it:
The idea is that if you build your own transmitter, it's going to be a short range device. It'll cover your home or an office building, but it won't cover the entire friggin' world. So if your watch syncs to that small transmitter, and you leave the transmitter range, your watch will start to drift. But again, it won't instantly forget what time it is; it will slowly drift over the next few days/months/years. Probably worst case if you built one of these in your home, then you go to work and your watch drifts so by the time you go home it's off by a few seconds, but then you get home and it re-syncs and you're good to go for the next day.
Back when I was in elementary school you could buy a wristwatch for under $20 that would keep time for years using only a single coin cell battery and could go more than a year with at most a minute or two of drift. And here we are decades later and you expect me to believe that clocks need to be synced to an external source every single minute just to keep accurate time? Just get a better clock already and stop expecting the rest of us to pay the upkeep for your old tech.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday August 28 2018, @03:41PM
Apparently it's already down closer to $3 -- someone linked below to an article from HackADay showing how to build a transmitter which can overpower and replace the existing clock sync signals using a total of three parts: a $1 ATTiny chip, a length of wire, and a battery. That only broadcasts a pre-programmed time though, so you'd likely want to add either a USB-to-serial interface so it can sync from a computer that syncs through the internet (and then you can remove the battery too and get power from USB) or a GPS receiver. But in the end you could probably sell such a device retail for $20-$30, meaning every year that the transmitter is inactive would save enough money to buy about a quarter million of them.