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What Closing a Government Radio Station Would Mean for Clocks
- msla 8y ago> WWV is the oldest continuously operating radio station in the United States. It's been on the air since 1920. It's signal provides a frequency standard for receivers. The time stamp is regulated by an atomic clock. But a 2019 budget proposal for NIST would close WWV, WWVH in Hawaii and WWVB, which syncs up the time for about 50 million radio-controlled clocks, wristwatches and appliances. Classic example of the government providing a pure utility, a utility with no profit motive, which private enterprise could never justify.
- Redoubts 8y agoDon’t we have satellites broadcasting super accurate time, now?
- owenmarshall 8y agoCourtesy of the US government.
- dewyatt 8y agoI have a wall clock that syncs from WWVB. It was pretty cheap and uses a single AA battery (which seems to last forever). I never have to update the time. Can satellite time provide an equivalent or better solution here?
- brianwawok 8y agoGPS could yes. Don’t know how many exist but would only add a few dollars in chips.
- owenmarshall 8y agoAnyone who has ever installed a GPS backed NTP appliance in a data center can quickly answer that. For those who haven’t: it involves drilling holes in the roof of your data center for a satellite antenna.
- Hello71 8y agodoesn't the wall work just as well?
- yardie 8y agoGPS requires line of sight to the satellites.
- reificator 8y agoAnd walls have two sides...
- __david__ 8y agoSo all your clocks need to be on outside walls?
- reificator 8y agoNo, but all your satellites would.
- yuubi 8y agoYou can see only about half the sky that way, which means usually getting almost as good a fix as with a roof mount antenna. For best results, you want the satellites to be as far apart as possible in the sky (measured by angle from your position, not miles between them). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_of_precision_(navigation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_of_precision_(navigat... . If you mainly care about time and can tolerate a few microseconds of error, usually being able to see 4 satellites might well be enough. I remember seeing a gps receiver designed just for time that could maintain sync using only one satellite (it assumed that it was bolted to an immovable object, and it might have needed to see 4 satellites at once at some point).
- myself248 8y agoNo, as I explain here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rfelectronics/comments/6nb6ky/do_cell_phones_receive_gps_signals_from_the_local/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rfelectronics/comments/6nb6ky/do_ce... To get halfway decent holdover performance, you want all the precision you can get when the constellation is good. That requires the best skyview (and least multipath) you can manage.
- vvanders 8y agoShortwave generally has much better propagation characteristics though buildings than gps.
- ddingus 8y agoWe have them, until we don't. Terrestrial AM Shortwave is super robust. And there is a ton of gear out there depending on it. The cost of the cut will be orders more than any savings. Worse, it will probably be turned right back on the moment saner heads prevail.
- tjohns 8y agoWe do. GPS is actually more accurate. That said... 1. GPS requires a clear line of sight to the sky. Doesn't work for indoor clocks. 2. Shortwave receivers are more energy efficient. 3. Redundancy is a good thing. Just in case GPS (or your receiver) has a problem. 4. WWV isn't just time. It also serves as a frequency reference for radio stations. It also transmits marine weather alerts, space weather (solar flares, etc.), and GPS system health updates. (Though apparently the marine weather notices are being discontinued in Jan 2019.)
- madengr 8y agoWWVB was a better reference due to surface wave propagation, but they added phase modulation which broke it as a frequency standard.
- nutcracker46 8y agoSatellites yes, and mobile phone infrastructure derives time and frequency from GNSS.
- darkmighty 8y agoNot to mention it's impossible to even charge for this service. I guess you could encrypt the stream, but a single key leak compromises everything (unless you assume devices are connected to the internet, which defeats the purpose of the system).
- zamadatix 8y agoLook at Sirius XM for a good reason world approach to this problem. It's not 100% foolproof but they manage to charge for the service well enough.
- cesarb 8y agoSatellite TV providers manage to make it work: each receiver has its own key in a smartcard, and the master key which encrypts the broadcast is gradually distributed to each receiver over the same radio channel. The master key is changed often, so leaking it once is not enough.
- barney54 8y agoNo. There are examples in the past with privately financed lighthouses which people think of as public good. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1091142107302182 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/109114210730218...
- JKCalhoun 8y agoI've not been able to find out why this is being cut.
- chatterbeak 8y agoThe entire NIST budget is pretty large. This is one of the most visible things they do. By threatening to cut this if their budget shrinks, perhaps they're hoping to preserve their original budget request.
- whatshisface 8y agoThat's a realistic story in light of how Sesame Street, one of PBS's most profitable (and absolutely self-sustaining) franchises, was used to campaign against budget cuts back in the day. If the NIST head was a completely unscrupulous government agent (not making any accusations of course) then it would clearly be in their interest to only offer to cut valuable high-profile programs, burying their cut-able pet projects as deeply as possible. That would be the strategy that minimized the political will to cut the budget. [0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/big-bird-in-the-presidential-debate-mitt-romney-advocates-cutting-funding-for-sesame-street-pbs/2012/10/04/f7f280ba-0e1f-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5d5b7b3d1155 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/big-bir...
- anticensor 8y agoThis will not fly in Turkey, as Turkish constitution applies the previous term's budget inflation adjusted if legistlature fails to approve the budget in time.
- aaronbrethorst 8y agoProbably for the same reason as any other low-savings cut in a Republican administration. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist#2001 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist#2001
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- jimpudar 8y agoI set my analog watch to WWV every couple of days. I'm in California, so I can actually hear both signals at the same time (one from Colorado, one from Hawaii). You can tell which signal is which by the gender of the announcer. Pretty cool stuff. It will be a very sad day for radio if it is discontinued.
- themodelplumber 8y agoIn the current solar minimum, sometimes it's the only station I can pull in on my shortwave receiver :-/ It will be sad to see another SW station go off-air. There's still plenty of fun to be had in other modes and bands though.
- pkaye 8y agoI remember when we used to have the POP-CORN number to check the time.
- sdca 8y agoAnalog AM/FM should be the next to go.
- vmchale 8y agowhat?
- dylan604 8y agoSeconded. Just watch any movie of a World War/Doomsday/Zombie Apocalypse level event occurs. The people get information via radio. They don't plug into the internet. The internet may no longer be there. This might be hard to imagine for the younger generations, as they've not known to not have the internet. Radios are very effective for broadcasting "pirate" signals, and are pretty easy to receive as well. It would not be that hard to MacGyvre a crystal radio together. It used to be everybody's first "learn electronics" project. You can even do it from non-digital equipment. Analog signals are "cool" in their low-tech abilities. Here's an example video of how low-tech you can go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqdcU9ULAlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqdcU9ULAlA
- nutcracker46 8y agoDigital is robust too - you can run mesh networks of phones and wifi equipment. Hams have a rep for mostly holding on to ancient technology, but they have demonstrated wideband microwave mesh networking with off the shelf hardware and lower bandwidth HF networking. Those goodies are more effective than the CW and SSB depictions in movies.
- dylan604 8y agoDigital requires being able to decode the transmission once received. That takes a bit of work on the receiving side that an analog signal would not. Digital has a lot of advantages, but in my opinion the single greatest advantage to analog is its simplicity. Just like an analog vinyl record. Put a pencil in the center hole to spin it, a sewing needle taped perpendicular to a piece of paper rolled into a cone and you have a decoder/player. This is the reason the Library of Congress archives audio to vinyl over any other format. There are times when "best" isn't the best option.
- nutcracker46 8y agoWWV, WWVH, and WWVB are more than charity for timekeepers. They distribute time and frequency, traceable to a national standard, for one leg of "positioning, navigation, and timing." Before GPS and the internet, numerous services depended on those signals. I would argue that now, we have positioning, navigation, and timing from multiple satellite systems (and a phone network providing excellent time & freq references derived from satellites). We have internet time synced to atomic standards and satnav. All of the modern references are more precise, accurate, and stable than WWV, WWVH, and WWVB. As to devices which sync from WWVB, there are gadgets which can get GPS time and transmit an LF signal for syncing those devices. No problems, ladies and gents, you've still got time.
- saagarjha 8y agoThe services you described as being dependent on these stations cannot necessarily be upgraded to use internet or satellite time.
- nutcracker46 8y agoThere 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 https://sites.google.com/site/wayneholder/controlling-time. He could use a precision frequency source if a precise 60 kHz was absolutely necessary.
- casylum 8y agoIt's not the phase stability that's important, but the accuracy and drift over time.
- saagarjha 8y agoI’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?)
- EricE 8y agoTurning off stuff like this is beyond stupid. Satellites are pretty freaking fragile. China has tested destroying them and has done so with their own pretty easily. A high altitude nuke would be pretty devastating too, and you don't need the nuke to survive re-entry to be effective (hello North Korea, Iran and others or government probably doesn't want to acknowledge as easily capable of such an attack). We pile all our eggs into single, fragile technological baskets at our peril. Dumbasses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbs7uLUPZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNbs7uLUPZ8
- yostrovs 8y agoAre moving satellites in space easier to take out than a stationary antenna in Colorado?
- dang 8y agoWe changed the URL from https://www.npr.org/2018/08/25/641835302/what-closing-a-government-radio-station-would-mean-for-your-clocks https://www.npr.org/2018/08/25/641835302/what-closing-a-gove... to the one that was submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18755285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18755285. It seems to be the more substantial article.
- yostrovs 8y agoSeems like these stations are a novelty for just about everyone. Kind of like candle-lit dinners. You can turn the LED lights to low, but real candles are cool. Or LPs... pretty cool indeed. But those novelties don't rely on the government to make sure candles are made and LPs of popular albums are available.
- zamadatix 8y agoNovelties? Plenty of building time clocks use this as it penetrates walls better than GPS (not to mention it's cheaper to both operate and use)
- mark-r 8y agoReplacing the existing infrastructure which uses these signals will be much more expensive and time consuming than anybody realizes.
- yostrovs 8y agoYou can use the stars to set time too: https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Navigation/ESA_sets_clock_by_distant_spinning_stars https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Navigation/ESA_sets_clock... To claim that the two radio stations in Colorado and Hawaii are our last grasp on time is a bit of a stretch. There are legacy systems in existence that rely on those stations, but none really seem particularly critical or that can't be easily moved over to something more modern than church bells.
- zamadatix 8y agoNot many stars in the middle of a building. Radio time isn't our last grasp on time but it is an efficient grasp that has been proven to work damn near everywhere for cheap. Old != obsolescent and you don't automatically save money by turning something currently in use off you have to look at the cost to remove or replace it in all use cases.
- AnthonBerg 8y agoIf you’d care to read the article it wouldn’t seem that way anymore.
- dylan604 8y ago>WWV, the oldest continuously operating radio station in the United States, first went on the air from Washington in 1919.... >The station subsequently was moved to Maryland and then to Colorado in 1966.... So, for it to be continuously operating, at some point, there would have been two transmitters operating. I wonder what the logistics of that would be like. Have both operating until it is validated that the 2nd/new one is working, and then shut down the first/old one? Do you just flip the switch on the old one, or do you start to lower the power output of the first one so that equipment picks up the second/new signal before ultimately turning it off. Essentially, it would be similar to running multiple APs on a wi-fi network I'd imagine. That's the stuff that makes me interested. There's no "maintenance" mode. It's all done live while hot type of stuff.
- Havoc 8y agoSounds like these aren't quite atomic clock level accurate so maybe a switch over is feasible. Other commenter said he can receive two stations so maybe not continuous in same freq?
- thinkloop 8y agoThe article says they are based on atomic clocks, but there is bound to be some variability from a radio signal traveling long distances.
- xiii1408 8y agoAll three radio stations (Washington, Maryland, and Colorado) used atomic clocks. Presumably they could handle the radio hand-off very precisely. ;) But actually--the precision of an atomic clock (nanoseconds) is orders of magnitude higher than lag due to radio wave travel (many microseconds). And even if you account for this, you probably only know your distance from the atomic clock to within 10 meters, which is tens of nanoseconds of uncertainty.
- thinkloop 8y agoI didn't read "continuously operating" as zero down time, more that there have been continued efforts and interest in operating it. No real idea though.
- stuaxo 8y agoFFS is there nothing this administration won't vandalise?
- lmz 8y agoWhen the Japanese JJY station shut down because of the tsunami, some people made signal generators using audio signals eg http://jjy.831337.xyz/ http://jjy.831337.xyz/ Would something similar be possible for WWVB?
- Havoc 8y agoHow expensive could it possibly be to keep this running? US gov isn't exactly poornad debating this probably cost more than just continuing
- abpavel 8y agoI can think of a number of viable business models. It has a strong following without any marketing, and surrounding industries rely on tech for radio controlled clocks etc. Private industry could easily profitably operate it, however the core technology - the atomic cloc - is nuclear weapon grade technology, which is simply unavailable to anyone but the government.
- m0zg 8y agoNot true. You can buy a rubidium atomic clock module for a little under $2K: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14830 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14830. I believe cheaper options are also available.
- m0zg 8y agoCheapest I was able to find quickly is $1107.23: https://www.mouser.com/Search/Refine.aspx?Keyword=rubidium https://www.mouser.com/Search/Refine.aspx?Keyword=rubidium
- jbangert 8y agoAtomic clocks show up on surplus auctions/stores somewhat frequently (they’re called a Caesium frequency standard, e.g. the HP 5071). There’s a few reports of enthusiasts keeping them running at home (http://leapsecond.com/ptti2003/tvb-Amateur-Timekeeping-2003.pdf http://leapsecond.com/ptti2003/tvb-Amateur-Timekeeping-2003....) I’m sure HP/Agilent/others will gladly sell you the newer state of the art modes as well (although as high precision, very low volume devices they’ll be fabulously expensive); if an industry consortium wants even more precision you could staff a research team and shave off a bit more frequency error. However, I think for industry it’s cheaper to use GPS receivers instead of supporting a powerful transmitter (and its use of value able spectrum). GPS can keep incredibly accurate time.
- EricE 8y ago"GPS can keep incredibly accurate time." Sure, as long as the satellites are up and you have line of sight. Aside from hostile actors, space debris, solar storms and other threats exist. We shouldn't take for granted that our satellites are just always going to be there. https://io9.gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-all-our-satellites-were-suddenly-d-1709006681 https://io9.gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-all-our-satelli...
- exabrial 8y ago$26m does seem a little steep with today's technology. That probably includes the price of being nuke proof... I'm guessing if we're merely worried about sprinklers watches and clocks we could let that level of hardening go
- dgacmu 8y agoThe stations are 6m. 26m is the total proposed cut, which also cuts atmospheric monitoring and more. This is a terrible idea. NIST is really, really useful.
- exabrial 8y agoThanks for the correction, I guess I didn't read closely enough. I still think this could be replaced an ran somewhat reliably for less than $1m/year. Considering you can get a 27mhz cb radio for $10, making something with one or two nines of uptime shouldn't be very expensive.
- dgacmu 8y agoIt has to be able to reach the coasts from Colorado. The current one is a 70 kW transmitter. That's higher than the majority of commercial AM/FM radio broadcast stations. You do have to know your way around that stuff to not get cooked.
- eaguyhn 8y agoNIST provides a standard way to introduce leap seconds, I believe. What alternatives are there for this? (One proposal eliminates leap seconds.)
- giardini 8y agoIts a budget cutback but it reads as if those in charge at NIST are threatening to shut off WWV and their clocks rather than cut research funding. They should simply reduce research and keep the clocks running.
- jrnichols 8y agoI wonder if a university could take over the entire thing and continue to provide the service.
- gumby 8y agoAlthough I consider this a crisis, I assume NIST put WWV on the chopping block for the same reasons your local town puts the libraries and parks on the chopping block first, followed by one fire station: visibility and, though I don't like the word, "pain". There's plenty of important but not sexy work going on (research into the kg, cryptography research, etc) that congress and the taxpayer might happily throw overboard (local equivalent to, say, fixing that bridge or surveying all gas lines for leaks -- "haven't found any yet so why not skip a year?"). This is a canary of a far more fundamental problem. And yes: the existence of stratum 0 sources like GPS does nothing to alleviate the need for RF sources like WWV, any more than GPS removed the need for LORAN-C, the decommissioning of which is now recognized as a serious mistake.