sla29970, Thanks for the report, which has personal nostalgia for me. My logbook has all US Navy loudenboomers on all frequencies including VLF. WWVL on 20 kH haa long been a silent key. The LORAN 1-PPS pulses alledged from Cape Fear never came from there; they came, as I personally verified, from Coast Guard NAVCEN in Wildwood, NJ. NASA should have had more influence on WWV, as the original location of the WWV transmitters was at what is now NASA Goddard (GSFS) in Greenbelt, MD. I once lived about a mile from there. The original quartz oscillators were and so far as I know are still buried in holes twenty feet deep. The NASA Goddard ham radio station W3NAN occupies the site.
There are many minor technical errors in the report, but it is still fun reading. The author missed Navy NST/AOK... station once known from Aorta, Spain. For whatever reason, there is no mention whatsoever of the US Navy Omega VLF system, once the worldwide timing beacon before satellite. I know that since I have one of the original Cesium oscillators once used to calibrate the eight stations. It was transported all over the world as an international first-class air passenger complete with battery case. I have its logbook. Dave [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Feb 22, 10:51 am, "David L. Mills" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>Before 1972 there were no leap secconds; however there were periodic >>introductions of tiny rate adjustments relative to Ephemeris Time (ET) >>that drove everybody nuts. > > > The broadcast time signals in the 1960s were so confusing that NASA > employed a geodesist to produce an explanation of how to interpret > them. He interviewed USNO's Markowitz, the chairman of IAU Comm 31 > (Time) who was a principal in adapting cesium resonators to the scheme > of broadcast time. The writeup is online at > http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19660020453_1966020453.pdf > The report uses terminology about time scales which was new and > evolving even at the time, and which has since been discarded, but > because it was produced for an audience other than those who ran the > time service bureaus it does define the terms pretty well -- well > enough to make it clear what a nightmare the pre-leap second scheme > was. _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
