SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, 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.