[R-390] Specific Products WWVC Receiver

[Roger Ruszkowski]

Sandy,

Once upon a time long ago (73, 74) I was designated the
official time keeper at a station in Okinawa.

Never mind the Okinawians had a satellite TV receiver dish up on the hill
and we used their time.

Time keeper was just one more maintenance shop maintenance duty.

There was two nice racks over by the antenna patch coupler racks.
The two racks had a receiver, scope, set of batteries and clock display.

You had a manual. In the manual was latitude and longitude tables.
Also was a interpolation work sheet.

You found your place on the planet once. 
That was all inked into the manual long before I arrived.
The bottom line was a set of delay numbers for each WWV station.
Plus Japan, Canada, Australia and several other "known signals"

You dialed WWV up on the receiver and put the time tick on one trace
or used it for the trigger on the sweep.

You drifted your time tick from your clock to the propagation delay
as calculated from tables in the manual.

You thus had time as close as you could get it.

All the oscillators in the receivers and scope could be referenced back to
the WWV carrier. This was all maintenance activities performed once a month.

Once each shift, the senior maintenance shift trick chief would have to 
go look at the clock and check the time. You then reported to the senior NCO
on the operations floor and acknowledged you were the maintenance chief of the
shift. You walked the operation floor, looked at the clock, eye balled the operation NCO
and went off to get some real work done.

We had these clocks at other stations were I served
But it was not my job to check then or maintain them.
Once in while (semi annually) I may of had to top off the batteries
and or do some real cleaning where one of them leaked and made a mess.

I think you have a real chunk of history
That receiver was state of the art time clock until we went to GPS time.
There may have been solid state version, But I bet that tubes ruled.
The stuff was just much more reliable, maintainable, teachable and plain robust.

The clock display was likely nixie tubes and long since re purposed.

Real time still depends on knowing your location and adding in the propagation delay time.

Roger AI4NI