Let me see if I've got this straight... The article talked about the locals losing time, hence not as many hours in the day in my interpretation. So the line monitor clock was running fast, as were the clocks of the locals, thus completing 24 hours in something less than that. So far, so good?
Now, if the monitor clock was developing bad bearings, thus causing it to run slow, the 'frequency manager' guy would see by comparison to the alleged GPS clock that he needed to crank up the generator RPM's to make up for the apparently slow line frequency. He may have also cranked in a little extra to make up for his perception that they were behind on their 24 hour obligation of 60x60x60x24 (=5184000) cycles per day. (I wonder if they have a chart to tell them how many rpm's to add to make up the shortfall, courtesy of some long forgotten EE who actually understood what was going on and could do the math?) Eventually, someone noticed in the outside world that tempus fugit, and the investigation spotted the fast line monitor clock and the high line frequency. So now the line frequency needs to be reduced below 60 Hz for quite a while maybe to bring everything back to where it should be. Being a somewhat small town, news travels fast and there probably isn't a lot local fluff to print anyway, so it made the paper. But actually, the newspaper article was done to tell the locals to reset their clocks so that the power company wouldn't have to run slow for however long it needed, and avoided further inconvenience to the citizenry. If the local papers in any major metropolis ever got wind of such sloppy frequency control, it would make the Toyota recall story look about as important as one of the editor's frequent grammar errors, while they proclaimed a conspiracy by the power company higher ups to cut down on fuel expenses, cheat on the environmental rules, and inflate usage to bilk consumers, not to mention the government's lax oversight and slow response to the 'crisis'. OK, sorry for that last cynical rant...well, a little sorry anyway. Regards, Tom Holmes, N8ZM Tipp City, OH EM79xx -----Original Message----- From: time-nuts-boun...@febo.com [mailto:time-nuts-boun...@febo.com] On Behalf Of Thomas A. Frank Sent: Saturday, April 10, 2010 12:52 AM To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Yukon Energy causes time sync problems > In this case, the reference clock appears to refer to GPS satellite > time, > but > uses a standard wall clock to display it. It is the reference clock > that > slowed down when it should have failed to work at all. Perhaps the > wall > clock > (maybe it was really a HP 113) needed oil. There's the real > question for > time > nuts: How did the reference clock slow down? I just went and re-read the article. It reads to me that the synchronous clock, not the GPS reference clock, was what suffered the problem. ----------- quote: The control centre's wall clock was running faster than the satellite clock over the last few days, so staff simply turned down generation as they normally do, without knowing there was an internal problem with their electric clock, he explained. Morgan said when the generation was turned down, electric clocks that were plugged into the wall - alarm clocks, stove clocks, microwave clocks - all slowed down. The change was quite slow and unnoticeable until several minutes had been lost over a few days, he said. ----------- Or do y'all think I am misinterpreting the story? Easier to believe that the synchronous clock went bad than the GPS clock. On a related note, I visited a remote navy base once and went to talk to the folks running the station power plant, which was comprised of 24 very large diesel generators. They had a $2 synchronous clock sitting next to a $2 battery operated quartz wall clock, and were manually controlling the frequency. I suggested that they at least get a high quality quartz clock, if not a GPS based clock for the reference...but that costs money, so they weren't planning to change. Also related, I have an Electro Industries frequency meter that I use to monitor the power line here in Rhode Island. I have never seen it vary more than .05 Hz from nominal (59.95 to 60.05). On the other hand, during a trip to Scotland, the power frequency went fully 0.5 Hz out, from 49.50 - 50.50, Hz while I was there. In both cases, the average is right on over the course of several days. Tom Frank, KA2CDK _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
