CHU Time Station : Western Canada Coverage Proposal
The CHU time station is Canada's domestic shortwave time signal station.
CHU existed long before the Internet and sattilite navigation systems like
(GPS, GLONASS, Gallaeo).
CHU provides most of the functionality of the US WWV & WWVB (Bolder,
Colorado) and WWVH (Kauai, Hawaii).
Problems with CHU's configuation that this proposal addresses
The 3.3µs per km of path that makes CHU's signals problamatic for users in
Western Canada. Even the NRC realizes this: "for all distant users of CHU,
the dominant source of time error comes from the radio wave path reflecting
off the ionosphere as the radio signal travels from the transmitter".
The poor quality of CHU reception in Western Canada and the Artic, North of
55º Latitude.
It is suggested that the 7335 kHz frequecny be reused, but it may be
advisable to find alternate frequences.
The CHU signal fomat may need to be tweaked so as to take into consideration
2 transmitter sites.
A new set of atomic clocks will be needed, as well as equipement to sync
them to NRC's atomic clocks. It may be possible to obtain secondhand atomic
clocks from UBC (Vancouver) or other universities in Western Canada.
This proposal could be replicated in Newfoundland using another existing CHU
frequency, as Eastern Canada has CHU coverage problems as well.
Universally upgrading CHU's Ottawa transmitters to 10 kw may not fix CHU
coverage problems in Western or Eastern Canada.
[...]
http://cbc.am/CHU.htm
As a project to learn more about building radio receivers, I'd like to
build a WWV receiver (or maybe a receiver for the Canadian station CHU,
since it's nearby and the format sounds easier to decode). I'm looking
for suggestions for how to design such a radio, reading material, etc.
I was thinking it might be easier to design a fixed-frequency receiver
(rather than a tunable one) because I could just select the L and C in the
resonant circuit to give the right frequency. Or, since WWV is at such
"round number" frequencies, maybe I could somehow use a crystal
oscillator?
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http://web.pas.rochester.edu/~tobin/