Broadcasting Atomic Clocks

From: Alex Knight <aknight_at_mindspring.com>
Date: Fri Jul 27 10:33:43 2001

Hello,

At 07:27 PM 7/26/2001 +0000, Shawn T. Rutledge wrote:

>I have an alarm clock which sets itself from this signal. Of course the
>first such clock (old enough to be on topic, even) AFAIK was the Heathkit
>Most Accurate Clock. But those cost big bucks. Nowadays I'm seeing more
>commercial clocks which do this, at reasonable prices.

I have a Radio Shack alarm clock that does this, they've been
on sale for $40 or so. I've even seen a big, wall-sized clock
at Costco that syncs to the broadcast time signal for $20.
The University of North Carolina just spent $20K or so outfitting
all of it's classrooms with this type of clock, I guess so the
students won't have an excuse for being late to the next class ;-)

>WWV is broadcast on at least 5, 10 and 15 MHz (exactly); maybe other
>frequencies too, I'm not sure. And I think some of the transmitters are
>in other places besides Colorado, the idea being that everywhere in the US
>you can always receive at least one of them. I'm not sure which freq(s)
>these clocks listen to.

Most (maybe all) of the "atomic-controlled" clocks sold as consumer products
synchronize to the WWVB transmissions on 60 KHz out of Ft. Collins,
Colorado. There is a nice description at the NIST web site:

http://www.boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/stations/wwvb.htm


Regards,

Alex Knight

The Calculator Museum Web Page
http://www.calcmuseum.com
Received on Fri Jul 27 2001 - 10:33:43 BST

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