7/2/2023 0 Comments Wwvb radioThe WWV stations are more than perfect timekeepers, too. “Plus, it’s vulnerable, as it’s prone to jamming as well as spoofing.” And “GPS does not penetrate into buildings, which is an obvious problem,” Lowe says. Internet connections aren’t available everywhere. What’s more, the nonradio alternatives just aren’t reliable, says John Lowe, station manager for WWVB and its sister high-frequency stations WWV, also in Fort Collins, and WWVH out of Kauai. Those household devices and industrial clocks generally don’t have Internet capability, Witherspoon points out, so without WWVB “we’d likely be getting on ladders twice a year to manually have our clocks spring forward and fall back.” Without WWVB, these devices won’t magically update themselves.” “It’s why factory workers and schools don’t need to drag out the stepladder every time we switch between daylight and standard time. “WWVB is the pacemaker for the world around us, even if we don’t realize it,” says Thomas Witherspoon, editor of shortwave radio news site The SWLing Post. These radio-equipped clocks are permanently tuned to WWVB’s low-frequency, 60-kilohertz signal. More than 50 million devices in the United States-including wall clocks, wristwatches, and industrial appliances-keep time through the signal from NIST’s WWVB station, operating from a site near Fort Collins, Colo., where it reads the time directly from an atomic clock. Do we really need radio-broadcast time signals in an era of Internet-connected devices and GPS? presidential budget calls for a 34 percent cut in NIST funding in response, the institute compiled a budget-use plan that would eliminate the WWV stations.Īt first blush it might sound like the natural end to a quaint public service from a bygone era. For others, it’s a service they’ve never heard of-yet in the background, it’s what keeps the clocks and appliances in their daily lives automatically ticking along on time.īut after 98 years, this constant companion could soon go off the air. For ham radio operators, hearing the friendly “National Institute of Standards and Technology Time!” announcement is a comforting old refrain. federal WWV radio stations have broadcast the official time without fail. Radio waves at these low frequencies use the earth and the ionosphere as a wave-guide and follow the curvature of the earth for long distances.Starting in May 1920, the U.S. This atomic clock regulates the WWVB radio transmitter located in Fort Collins, Colorado, where the exact time signal is continuously broadcast throughout the United States at 60 kHz to take advantage of stable long wave radio paths found in that frequency range. These physicists have created an international standard, measuring a second as 9,192,631,770 vibrations of a Cesium 133 atom in a vacuum. A team of atomic physicists continually measures every second of every day to an accuracy of ten billionths of a second per day. Today, time is precisely measured in the United States by the most accurate clock in North America, the Atomic Clock of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, Time and Frequency Division in Boulder, Colorado. Since the beginning of time, man has been fascinated with the measurement of time and has devised more accurate machines to trap and measure time. And nothing keeps track of time more precisely and trouble free than our radio controlled clocks.
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