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#wwvb

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For North America folks interested in low-maintenance, accurate atomic/radio clocks, but live outside the expected WWVB range¹ :

The La Crosse UltrAtomic large wall clock has a semi-novel internal two-antenna design that allows the WWVB signal to be picked up at greater distances (such as southcentral Alaska) when conditions are favorable (especially at night).

And since the modern WWVB signal² embeds DST/ leap seconds / etc well in advance of actual changes, and since the oscillator is relatively low drift ... the time accuracy window is pretty robust.

It takes either two or four D batteries. Four will get you around four years of life in ANC (in my experience).

So between the self-setting and the long battery life .... you can put a visible, affordable, low-maintenance clock in a hard-to-reach place, even in Alaska.

And here's a great teardown for the geeks:
leapsecond.com/pages/ultratomi

(not affiliated or compensated, just a fan!)

¹‍tf.nist.gov/stations/wwvbcover
²‍nist.gov/publications/wwvb-tim

Today is the first day I've found a use for an Arduino Due board that I bought 11 years ago.

(It's so old that - for Toronto nerds - it was bought in Creatron's east-of-Spadina location)

I'm getting slightly more out of my ES100 WWVB receiver board with it, but it's still no magic time-sync machine

(yes, I know that WWVB doesn't work that way. And I know that one of the broadcast antennae at Fort Collins is off the air)

#arduino#wwvb#time

Before the interwebs, we used to check #WWV for solar conditions, now commonly referred to as "space weather".

Geophysical alerts are broadcast from WWV at 18 minutes after the hour and from WWVH at 45 minutes after the hour.

I truly believe that without WWV and #WWVB, life would lose much of its luster,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WWV!

#dx#swl#ham