Frnak McKenney wrote:
Bill,

Thanks for the comments.

On Mon, 29 Dec 2008 07:17:39 -0400, Bill M wrote:
Frnak McKenney wrote:
I'd like to listen in on NIST's 60kHz time broadcasts on WWVB
"directly", but I like building things, and besides, I'm too chea...
er, "thrifty" to go out and buy a VLF-specific receiver.
May be a moot point if you're just doing this for the heckuvit but
there's nothing to listen to per se at WWVB since the time is encoded
with pulse width modulation, ie no voice.

I'm hoping that what I build will at least give me some idea of
the WWVB signal strength. I started out being curious about the
various "Atomic clocks" and thought about building a dedicated
60kHz WWVB receiver, but one of the problems one runs into with
an idea like that is that "debugging" can be exremely frustrating
without some piece of equipment that can offer a "second opinion".

It's a question of "navigating" towards a solution. Without some
sort of compass -- or at least some recognizable waypoints -- you
have no idea if you're getting closer to a working design, going
in circles, or moving further and further away. VOMs, 'scopes,
signal generators, spectrum analyzers, PRINT/printf(), and even
(Ack! Phlbbbbt!) 16" tall fanfold core dumps are all tools we
have created for helping us find our way through mazes where our
everyday senses are useless.

And, as you say, I'm just curious: if WWVB is out there, unheard
(by me, so far), I wonder what else might be? grin!


Frank
--
If you are not being criticized, you may not be doing much.
-- Donald Rumsfeld
--
Frank McKenney, McKenney Associates
Richmond, Virginia / (804) 320-4887
Munged E-mail: frank uscore mckenney ayut mined spring dawt cahm (y'all)
I wonder if NAA is still on the air. They were on 14 KHZ IIRC and at
least the were sending CW. I remember an article in QST where someone
built a regenerative receiver to pick up their signal using old
honeycomb coils and a .001uf variable capacitor. Someone else did the
same thing, but used an old tv flyback transformer (minus the ferrite
core) for the coil and a three gang TRF capacitor to tune it.

But how long is a 1/2 wave antenna at that frequency?