[amsat-bb] Fwd: White House wants to eliminate WWV

[Daniel Schultz]

The September/October issue of QEX that just landed in my mailbox has two
articles by WB0OEW and WA5FRF describing Doppler measurements of the WWV and
WWVB signals compared against GPS disciplined oscillators to measure
ionospheric disturbances, the second article describes the effect of last
year's solar eclipse on WWV signal propagation. There are other articles in
professional journals that I will look up if anyone is interested in reading
them. If WWV was not already broadcasting frequency and time signals,
ionospheric researchers would have to set up their own transmitter to do the
same thing, probably at higher cost.

https://zenodo.org/record/998278#.W4_heLgnaUk 
https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/weird-signals-listening-eclipse

The February issue of QST published an article by WD8DSB describing a TRF
receiver for frequency counter calibration with crystal filters to feed an
amplified WWV signal at either 5 or 10 MHz directly to your frequency counter.
Internet time servers and cell phone networks do not provide such a frequency
reference, and GPS disciplined oscillators are not an off the shelf item. It
is also good to have an independent check on the performance of GPS
disciplined equipment. 

There are also millions of WWVB synchronized clocks that will be rendered
obsolete if WWVB is taken off the air. As with amateur radio, WWV and WWVB
will work even without a functioning internet connection.  

The 6 million dollar proposed savings are well below the noise level of the
Federal budget process. The sentence about eliminating "measurement science
research that lies outside NIST's core mission space" is Trump-speak for
eliminating any climate change research from NIST's budget, WWV is about the
only item on the cut list that is not related to climate research.

Dan Schultz N8FGV

>"Can we see a list of technical reasons it is worthy of this expense?
>Sincerely,
>Marcus Sutliff/N5ZY"