[GreenKeys] Western Union Time

[Jim Haynes]

I have a friend who has a Radio Shack "time cube" a long-discontinued
product that is a WWV receiver.  He built a detector for the hourly
tone and that syncs his clock.  Of course the signal doesn't come in
at all hours of the day and night, but it comes in often enough to keep
the clock accurate.

I found an inexpensive WWV receiver on ebay some years ago, made for
some industrial purpose and it's controlled by a microprocessor and
comes with no documentation.  So I've never been able to get it to
do anything useful.  (But I haven't tried very hard)

I once found a web site with material about hacking into a Radio Shack
WWVB clock for various purposes, but it sounded like more work than
I wanted to get into.

When the man says "radio controlled clocks" I assume he is talking about
the WWVB controlled "atomic clocks" that are widely sold.  Then one of
the companies that makes those also makes a system that involves
rebroadcasting the WWVB signal at VHF and clocks that receive the VHF
signal.  The reason for this is that in an industrial complex or a
college campus you can't always find a place where the WWVB signal is
strong enough to control a clock, so they use one good receiver site
and all the clocks can receive the repeated signal.   I may be confused
about this - maybe it's GPS time rather than WWVB that the rebroadcast
point receives.