#timenut — Public Fediverse posts

For North America folks interested in low-maintenance, accurate atomic/radio clocks, but live outside the expected WWVB range¹ :

The La Crosse UltrAtomic large wall clock has a semi-novel internal two-antenna design that allows the WWVB signal to be picked up at greater distances (such as southcentral Alaska) when conditions are favorable (especially at night).

And since the modern WWVB signal² embeds DST/ leap seconds / etc well in advance of actual changes, and since the oscillator is relatively low drift ... the time accuracy window is pretty robust.

It takes either two or four D batteries. Four will get you around four years of life in ANC (in my experience).

So between the self-setting and the long battery life .... you can put a visible, affordable, low-maintenance clock in a hard-to-reach place, even in Alaska.

And here's a great teardown for the geeks:
http://leapsecond.com/pages/ultratomic/

(not affiliated or compensated, just a fan!)

¹‍https://tf.nist.gov/stations/wwvbcoverage.htm
²‍https://www.nist.gov/publications/wwvb-time-signal-broadcast-new-enhanced-broadcast-format-and-multi-mode-receiver

#WWVB #Alaska #TimeNut

@[email protected] The only beautiful frequencies are "50" because I'm in Europe and "10000000.000" because so much is locked to grid (and grid performance) and the second number is what I want my reference oscillator to present in my frequency counter display...

I think we agree, because those are simply conventions that have become targets worth attaining and not inherently beautiful. Also, the more floating point precision the second has, the better it is, making it non-int. Rounding to int devalues it. #timenut