[Elecraft] WWV/WWVH Closure

[Dale Chayes]

> On Aug 20, 2018, at 11:32 , John Harper <johnae5x at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> What is the justification for continued funding of WWV? Hasn't it been
> obsoleted (if that's a verb) by GPS as far as being a time and freq
> standard?


Here is (are?) my two cents: 

I think this is a significant mistake for at least two big picture reasons:

1)  There are still many devices (notably standalone clocks and watches) that set time from these signals, and

2)  it is the only global tool w/ have to maintain a reasonable approximation of “correct” time in the event of a GPS failure which _will_ happen some day (ref: Normal Accidents by Perrow- see below)

and one small-picture reason: 

they are a stable, reliable ways to check propagation and HF receiver system performance.  Nothing wrong with beacons, but these frequencies are easy to remember ;-)

Never mind for the nostalgic value.

With regard to #2, I was personally impacted by two failures during the experimental phase of GPS: 
- ground control uploaded ephemeris data with a “zero” for orbit altitude, all receivers that didn’t crash on math errors produced a position at the center of the ellipsoid, and
- the (very limited) constellation orbit inclinations were changed and our rise time predictions were so far off we did not find any satellites to track

To the best of my knowledge we haven’t seen any blunders of this scale since the system went into normal operation but eventually we be impacted by either a similar blunder or a successful hack. 

Normal Accidents, Living with High Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow, 1999 (yeah, old but still true and the book is widely available.)
ISBN 9781400828494

-Dale KB1ZKD
> 
> John AE5X
> https://ae5x.blogspot.com
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