[time-nuts] HP 117/10509a...

[Majdi S. Abbas]

On Sat, Jul 07, 2012 at 02:23:56PM -0700, J. Forster wrote:
> I agree with that objective, but, I have seen peoplwe take BC-611 radios
> and put cheap CB into the box. That interests me not in the slightest.

John,

	Depends.

	For time of day receivers, a retrofit makes a lot of sense.
Otherwise you need to deal with providing your own serial, IRIG,
display, etc. outputs.

	I'm not sure I want to reimplement all that if I can pass
the time code through and synthesize the modulation.

	At least in the short term.  Long term, you want to develop
the whole thing, but this will get receivers working until that
can happen.

	[Warning: More whining below.  :) ]

> I agree the LORAN-C shutdown was idiotic, but NIST is essentially
> obsoleting all phase tracking receivers by going to BPSK. IMO, it is
> essentially like the change from LORAN-A to LORAN-C, except that it will
> happen at some defined date/time rather than over the years.

	No, and that's my biggest problem.  There /isn't/ a defined
date/time.  We got a week long experiment, then a month long experiment,
then "sometime in July or August this becomes permanent."

	If there had actually been a published timeline, as well as
a published specification for the new modulation, so that we had
time to work on this in advance, I'd really have no objection.

	But there are still no docs and we still have no date -- the
best we can tell is, the change will happen before there is any
additional documentation besides the PTTI paper.

	Supposedly this is because they are still testing, but who
rolls out a change to a production service without knowing what it
is until the last minute?  

	Here, a lot of people received their notification from
vendors like Spectracom -- why is a vendor notifying me of changes
to a government service?  Shouldn't NIST do that themselves?  Why
not a published announcement on the WWVB website?  (Not just the
testing announcements, but a real notification that a permanent
change is pending and what it's going to look like.)

	Shoot, why not announcements on WWV/H?  There's probably a
fair bit of overlap in terms of people that use both.

	After the loss of LORAN, losing the only backup we have, 
without a defined timeframe, and with no ability to develop a
receiver in advance, is really pretty bad.  Even USCG gave us
some notice.

	--msa