On Sun, 20 May 2012 18:34:03 +0000 (UTC), "Geoffrey S. Mendelson"
wrote:

Jeff Liebermann wrote:
dark if the US pulls the plug on WWVH and WWVB. That's not going to
happen. Quite the contrary, there are plans to add a US east coast
transmitter. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB
under "Service Improvement Plans".

That's dead. What's left as of March 2012 is a plan to move from AM to BPSK,
which is supposed to make it possible to receive the signal farther away
and in areas with more noise and multipath distortion.

There was a trial in early March, any see any results yet?

How will this affect any old devices that use the AM signal method?

No. AM transmissions were to continue, alternating with phase shift
modulation.
http://www.jks.com/wwvb.pdf
In an attempt to cost-effectively address the reception
challenges, NIST is introducing a new protocol for
the WWVB broadcast, which will preserve its amplitude modulation
properties, in order to maintain backwards compatibility and not
impact existing devices, while adding phase-modulation that would
allow for the greatly improved performance.

Some details on the test. I couldn't find any conclusions or official
results:
http://www.jks.com/wwvb/wwvb.html

Will someone be selling, as I proposed (and shouldda patented) devices that
get the correct time via NTP and broadcast microwatt signals for local area
time sync?

Good idea. I haven't seen any such device. Instead of broadcasting,
this might be a good use for power line communications (HomePlug, X10,
etc.) or RF (Z-wave).

Incidentally, while broadcasters seem to be killing off their OTA time
signals (used to set VCR clocks), the cable providers are using OOB
(out of band) signaling to set the clock in their cable set top boxes.
You could probably retransmit that data to a wall clock.

If all else fails, you can call the NIST at 303-499-7111 for WWV and
just play the time over a speaker. Yep, it works.

Web clock:
http://nist.time.gov
It says accurate to 0.3 seconds.

More on such clocks:
http://www.precisionclock.com


--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558