
What Closing a Government Radio Station Would Mean for Clocks - MagicPropmaker
https://www.voanews.com/a/time-may-be-running-out-for-millions-of-clocks/4554376.html
======
nutcracker46
WWV, 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.

~~~
anishathalye
I made one of these GPS -> WWVB simulators a couple years ago. There's a short
write-up here, in case anyone is interested in reading about it:
[https://www.anishathalye.com/2016/12/26/micro-
wwvb/](https://www.anishathalye.com/2016/12/26/micro-wwvb/)

There are also some neat iPhone apps that use the audio circuitry to produce a
low-power signal that can be picked up by radio-controlled clocks that are
close by: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clock-
wave/id1073576068?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clock-
wave/id1073576068?mt=8)

A couple people mentioned the FCC and licensing issues in the comments below.
As far as I know, as long as you're transmitting at a very low power (40 µV/m
as measured at 300m), it's okay. This should be fine for personal use, but
won't work on a municipal level.

~~~
escherplex
Not bad! While reading the article the thought occurred that if WWV were
eliminated then this would be a good opportunity for a smart phone app to pipe
a GPS derived time standard emulating WWV format into a < 100mw (Part 15) 5,
10, or 15 MHz attached transmitter. And the idea was already objectified.

------
msla
> 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
Don’t we have satellites broadcasting super accurate time, now?

~~~
dewyatt
I 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?

~~~
owenmarshall
Anyone 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
doesn't the wall work just as well?

~~~
yardie
GPS requires line of sight to the satellites.

~~~
reificator
And walls have two sides...

~~~
__david__
So all your clocks need to be on outside walls?

~~~
reificator
No, but all your satellites would.

------
jimpudar
I 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
In 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.

------
dylan604
>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.

~~~
thinkloop
I 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.

~~~
alehul
This. Continuously operating means a very different thing to a hacker than to
the general populace. :)

------
lmz
When 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?

------
gumby
Although 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.

------
Havoc
How expensive could it possibly be to keep this running?

US gov isn't exactly poornad debating this probably cost more than just
continuing

~~~
barney54
$26 million a year. It’s in the article.

~~~
Forge36
That's the total cut. Cost of the stations isn't in the article. Reading
around it appears to be ~6.3 million.

------
EricE
Turning 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
Are moving satellites in space easier to take out than a stationary antenna in
Colorado?

~~~
mikeash
Probably. Colorado has defenses. A large-scale ICBM attack would get through,
but bombers or a small ICBM attack wouldn’t.

~~~
dylan604
Huh? I just did the first step of any intelligence gathering, and looked it up
on Google maps. It's an unguarded dirt road off of an FM country-style 2 lane
road. It's not even blurred out, for you know, security reasons. You could
practically drive right up to the transmitter/antenna, and take it out with
what ever crude/rudimentary method you chose including just driving your truck
into it. You could probably buy a couple of local yocals enough beer/whiskey
to convince them it would be a fun thing to use the building for target
practice. It's a super soft target. By the time anyone could figure out that
the transmitter was offline, and then decide to actually send a crew out to
investigate, the attackers could already be on a plane to wherever. ICBM
attacks are something that is closely watched with early-warning satellites,
and have automatic response procedures.

~~~
mikeash
That sort of attack would result in minor damage and it would be quickly
fixed. To permanently destroy the transmitter would require blowing it up, and
NORAD will make that difficult.

~~~
dylan604
I think you have too much faith in NORAD. Shoot, do it on Christmas, they're
too busy tracking Santa.

NORAD isn't going to notice a truck loaded with explosives doing the speed
limit on a road that is perfectly legal for it to be on. You're over
complicating the level of attack required. Think guerilla style. I've been to
TV/Radio antenna farms. They are not reinforced anything. There's a pad lock
on a chain securing a chain link fence gate. They are sheet metal structures
around the equipment for the sole purpose of keeping the equipment out of the
elements. Even if you don't take out the transmitter, taking out the antenna
would also suffice. The antenna structures are super vulnerable. If a 1500'
tower collapses, it takes a bit of time to get it back up once the
parts&pieces have been gathered and assembled at the site. Here's a list of
how non-intended accidents involving antenna structures[0], so imagine someone
that intends to do harm. At this point, I'm concerned what my Google search
history might lead one to suspect.
[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_catastrophic_collapses...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_catastrophic_collapses_of_broadcast_masts_and_towers)

~~~
the_duke
If there were local agents with a truck of explosives, there would be way, way
more valuable targets to attack though.

~~~
dylan604
That depends entirely on the plot of the movie. If it’s a terrorist thing,
then yeah it’s probably going to be a shopping mall, sporting event or
similar. If it’s an opening salvo to take out “key” infrastructure clearing
the way for a larger something later, then it’s perfect.

------
JKCalhoun
I've not been able to find out why this is being cut.

~~~
yostrovs
I'm guessing it's a similar reason that church bells aren't carefully budgeted
for to keep the town running. Do you use WWV?

~~~
birdman3131
I run a casio waveceptor watch. It is accurate to within half a second of what
the local tv uses for broadcast time and seeing as I am involved in a live
broadcast then yes i do need that accuracy weekly.

------
jrnichols
I wonder if a university could take over the entire thing and continue to
provide the service.

------
eaguyhn
NIST provides a standard way to introduce leap seconds, I believe. What
alternatives are there for this? (One proposal eliminates leap seconds.)

------
exabrial
$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
The 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
Thanks 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
It 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.

------
giardini
Its 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.

------
pkaye
I remember when we used to have the POP-CORN number to check the time.

------
dang
We changed the URL from [https://www.npr.org/2018/08/25/641835302/what-
closing-a-gove...](https://www.npr.org/2018/08/25/641835302/what-closing-a-
government-radio-station-would-mean-for-your-clocks) 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.

------
sdca
Analog AM/FM should be the next to go.

~~~
vmchale
what?

~~~
dylan604
Seconded. 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
Digital 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
Digital 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.

------
yostrovs
Seems 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
Novelties? 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)

~~~
yostrovs
You can use the stars to set time too:
[https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Navigation/ESA_sets_clock...](https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Navigation/ESA_sets_clock_by_distant_spinning_stars)

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
Not 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.

------
abpavel
I 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
Not 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
Cheapest 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)

