[Elecraft] KX3 Accuracy of clock

[Fred Jensen]

Actually ... "atomic clocks" such as the UTC one hanging on the wall of 
my shack [that I won at radio club raffle] don't "poll 10MHz."  They 
listen for WWVB on 60KHz, which mine hears only at night here in CA. 
WWVB broadcasts a continuous IRIG-H time code with a somewhat obscure AM 
modulation scheme [they recently added the same time code using a phase 
modulation scheme *very* loosely resembling PSK-31].  Doing this in the 
K3 would require a 60KHz receiver, demodulator, decoder, and probably a 
ferrite antenna.

Whether or not mine updates at night depends on a number of factors, not 
the least of which is ambient noise.  It usually is in sync with WWV on 
any of the MF and HF frequencies, but that's not guaranteed, I just 
checked and it's about 35 secs slow now.  My dive watch does vastly 
better. :-)

I volunteer at the local blood bank and recording times is important to 
the documentation of the process.  Consequently, they installed "atomic 
clocks", our little center has 5 of them, not all the same mfr, 
scattered around to be visible to the staff.  I've watched them differ 
by more than 90 seconds at times, and rarely are any two of them in sync.

I assume my K3 runs the clock [which I never use] off the one of the 
processor clocks.  I recently built a 40-station irrigation controller 
for my wife [we live on 5 acres and she's a kamikaze gardener] using the 
Hamstack components.  Their C-library includes a clock adjustment 
capability.  I have two separate CPU's, one is a little fast and one is 
just a tad slow.  I now have them adjusted so they're within a second or 
two of each other after a month or so.  Maybe the K3 could include 
something like that, accessible through the K3 Utility?

73,

Fred K6DGW
- Northern California Contest Club
- CU in the 2014 Cal QSO Party 4-5 Oct 2014
- www.cqp.org

On 12/2/2013 12:14 PM, Todd Atkins wrote:
> I wonder how easy/hard it would be to have the radio poll 10Mhz (like the
> atomic clocks do) every so often when powered on, to keep the time more
> accurately.  That would be a pretty cool feature.
>
> Todd, K4MSW