FY 2019 budget requests shutdown of NIST time stations

there's a lot of commercial and financial potential in the amateur radio bands that's not being utilized frankly, I don't see why they don't just do the logical thing and remove FCC jurisdiction over those bands entirely and revoke all the licenses for this obsolete technology.

bitrex wrote

I am not sure it is real, and did not read the budget proposal. But taking those reference stations off-line will likely interfere with national security. It is the backup to GPS, the Chinese and Russians have the ability to shoot down GPS sats. Then you will need celestial navigation at sea and some short of short-wave time reference for example. I have read that the Navy is training their navigators to be able to use sextants again, just for that situation. I have done some training and actually own a cheap one myself.

At least you will know to within a mile or two where you are... But you need very accurate time. I have a waterproof radio watch, radio clock....

What makes you think that it isn't the intention? You already have a Manchurian candidate in the White House put there by Putin's help.

Be a real shame if they take the 60kHz signal off line - there must be a lot of self setting atomic disciplined clocks out there. Rugby MSF got moved a few years ago to Anthorn but there is no intention to shut it down. I have a feeling that the long wave antenna is also used for direct communication with submerged nuclear submarines at ~16kHz.

Scrambling them or jamming their signals would be enough. The real threat to all satellite navigation systems is another Carrington event level solar flare that actually hits our ionosphere. It did quite enough damage to high latitude infrastructure in the 1859 pre-electronics era.

Short wave radio propagation could also be compromised by an exo atmospheric nuclear weapon detonation (a highly likely opening gambit).

The humble quartz wristwatch does pretty well once adjusted. You no longer need an exotic certified marine chronometer that costs a good fraction of the value of the ship to keep accurate time at sea.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Yes, you are right. You don't see.

Rick C.

What's wrong with Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp to chat?

Cell phones. Email. GPS for frequency.

Ham radio, and WWV, are pretty much obsolete.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

When the power goes out for an extended period, the cell phones will only last about 4 hours or less. The Internet even less. Hams generally are prepared for that sort of thing.

We should see what happens this Friday on the central East coast.

one of those hobbies that apparently every one who designs electronics is supposed to have been into that I guess I missed out on. PCs, modems/Internet and model rockets were way more fun than listening to old fuddie-duddies blather on about their "rig" in-between blasts of atmospheric interference. Plus there were girls on the Internet

Yeah like those guys who like to drive around in pickups with five whip antennas on them and a bunch of yellow beacons and strobes and "CIVILIAN EMERGENCY RESPONSE" decals like they're a somebody.

GPS gets jammed by the authorities.

There were regular NOTAMs w.r.t. just that over west Wales. I'm told there is another near "RAF" Lakenheath for the end of the month (anti drone jamming tests, also 868MHz)

I know somebody who said his GPS indicated he was directly over RAF Boscombe Down runway, despite being able to see it off the end of his right wing.

Back in 2009, somebody cut a couple of fiber-optic cables in San Jose CA during the wee hours of the morning. This wiped out essentially all telephone-call capability in the whole south half of the county for most of the day... landlines and cellphones were both down, as were most Internet connections.

The only comms that kept working reliably were various forms of land mobile radio (police, fire, and some business-band), and ham radio. The local ham emergency-communications teams were mobilized out to police and fire stations, major road intersections, and the city EOCs. I spent the afternoon at a church parking lot near a major road down from the hills, with a big "Emergency communication" banner up, in case somebody came screaming down the slope to report a fire or illness or accident (none happened, fortunately; we were very lucky that day, that nobody died as the result of an inability to phone for help when they needed it).

It wasn't until around 5 PM that the phone systems began to come back up.

None of the emergency folks have satellite phones?

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Right. Ham blather always seemed boring to me. CW even stranger.

Not many girls were hams.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Not a lot. I believe that the various city and county comm vans are probably equipped, but they're a very limited resource - good for coordinating between jurisdictions, and perhaps for the individual incident command staff personnel, but there aren't/weren't enough for a large number of people to be supplied with them.

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There are times when the only comms in and out of an area are amateur radio . In a disaster area comms are one of the critical resources that goes dow n. Ham radio only requires a portable generator and an antenna that has su rvived or a portable antenna that was not outdoors. Yes, hams actually pra ctice this stuff too.

Besides, your initial premise that the bandwidth is "valuable" is bogus. H am bands are typically divided into very narrow channels and the total widt h is not much. In addition several of the Ham bands must tolerate interfer ence from other sources in the same band or spillage from adjacent bands. Commercial use won't tolerate that so those bands are useless for commercia l comms.

Rick C.

Once again posting an opinion based on ignorance. At least he is consistent. You can tell what is correct by assuming JL is wrong.

Rick C.

I don't know how bad this storm will be, certainly the coastal areas are go ing to be hit hard. But Florence may be another Harvey dumping feet of wat er over inland areas. Up this way (central Maryland) they've already had a bunch of water from the previous storm and have lots of flooding now. If Florence moves up to that area any time in the next week it will be very ba d indeed.

Rick C.

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Your "wing" anecdote is not very convincing. At any given time GPS can be off by dozens of feet if not hundreds. It depends on the geometry of the e ver changing GPS satellite constellation. If a small number of sats cluste red together are all you can see, the error can get very large. There was a ship that crashed onto rocks at night because the skipper was hell bent t o get somewhere and ignored everything but the GPS which was wrong at that moment due to a poor constellation (which are reported in advance if you bo ther to read the bulletins).

That said, I do believe GPS is jammed locally for specific reasons. I can' t prove it, but a location on Gambrill is line of sight to Camp David if yo u could see through all the trees. It is very hard to find the geocache up there because everyone sees a random error of some 300 feet on a ridge whe re sats should be very visible. Very possibly Camp David is using active j amming/spoofing of the signals... but that's not really proof.

Rick C.

Even if they did, who would be able to call them?

Rick C.