[time-nuts] WWVB Now a Monopoly

[J. Forster]

Two comments:

First is a matter of principle...  the 'upgrade' was done with public
money, taxpayer money. We bought and paid for it. It should be freely
available. Xtendwave is essentially taxing a public service.

If Xtendwave wants a monopoly on time, they should build their own
transmitter, rather than sponging off the taxpayers.

Second, I don't care about TOD. My interest is in a standard of time
interval.

YMMV,

-John

========================



>
> On 26 Sep, 2012, at 10:03 , J. Forster wrote:
>
>> You go after everything. Soup to nuts, including the contract
>> agreements.
>>
>> IMO, this is potentially very, very big money, because Xtendwave may
>> also
>> have patent protection, and henceforth control all the precise digital
>> clock market. This is tens of millions of units, at least.
>
> They claim to have applied for patents on something but I would be
> surprised if they could patent anything that would prevent anyone
> from designing their own receiver.
>
> What would annoy me is less-than-full disclosure of the transmitted
> signal and its properties.  For example, there's a claim in the paper
> that the (31 26) Hamming code used can detect double-bit errors in the
> encoded time.  I think detecting double-bit errors would require an
> additional parity bit, and that the assertion in the paper is just a
> boo-boo, but I also keep wondering if the claim might in fact be true,
> that there might be a really clever way to use that with something else
> in the signal to detect double-bit errors, and the paper just isn't
> pointing that out.  That would be annoying.
>
> Dennis Ferguson
>
>