Antenna for receiving WWV/10MHz: am I asking too much?
 

Richard Clark wrote:
On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:06:49 -0700, Jim Lux
wrote:


hear the tocks fairly clearly and even understand the voice. (Who
knew the announcer's phrase for UTC "Coordinated Universal Time"?).

UTC is not an acronym. It's a madeup identifier that matches neither
the English (Coordinated Universal Time) or the French (T U C.. I won't
even attempt to figure out what it is..).


Hi All,

In fact, UTC is an acronym (already anticipated by Frnak and
explicitly stated every minute). It is but one of several, this one
being rather genericized (because any longer would force a lot of
talking, and minute passes by pretty quickly). The others would
include: UTC(NIST), UT1; and the academic UT0, and UT2.

Au contraire...
while UT1, UT0, and UT2 are, in fact, acronyms of a sort, primarily
based on astronomical time, this is not the case for UTC..

the coordination has to do with matching up UT and TAI (atomic) time..
all those leap seconds, etc.

As one online source puts it:
The (Bureau Internationale de l'Heure) BIH was charged with the task of
monitoring and maintaining the program and introduced the term Temps
Universel Coordinné or Coordinated Universal Time for the coordinated
time scale in 1964.

BIH is the predecessor of the current BIPM (who seem to have a problem
with the standard kilo losing mass) http://www.bipm.org/


or, for more information:
http://syrte.obspm.fr/journees2004/PDF/Arias2.pdf

which says: The name of Coordinated Universal Time UTC appeared in CCIR
documents in the early 60s.

One might also seek a paper from 1964, by Guinot. (who was a time guy at
the BIH back then)

A paper by Dennis McCarthy at USNO on "Evolution of Time Scales"
mentions in Section 6 that: the term "Coordinated Universal Time" was
introduced in the 1950s to designate a time scale in which the
adjustments to quartz crystal clocks were coordinated among
participating laboratories in the US and UK.


A more recent paper by Guinot says:
"Until 1965, the more or less common scale for emission of signals,
which had received spontaneously the name of Coordinated Universal Time
(UTC), had not been strictly defined."



The reason for the initials order is that there is an hidden comma.
Universal Time, Coordinated.

Funny, thing, though, that if one searches the literature of the time
for that particular sequence of words, it never occurs..

Given that Coordinated Universal Time existed well before UTC, I suspect
that the comma thing is a post hoc creation.


Wikipedia reports this as an erroneous
expansion, but Wikipedia wasn't there in my Metrology classes (a
couple dozen miles from NBS) where we worked with these NBS standards.
It wasn't there when (1974) I performed the second leap second on my
Cesium Beam Standard which was calibrated through WWVB (taking about
half an hour, part of which was waiting during the roughly 15 minute
intervals between TOCs). My antenna was so far away (on the fantail
of the ship in another "time zone"), that I had to slip the time by
100nS.

Antenna for receiving WWV/10MHz: am I asking too much?
 

Jim Lux wrote:
Richard Clark wrote:

The reason for the initials order is that there is an hidden comma.
Universal Time, Coordinated.

Funny, thing, though, that if one searches the literature of the time
for that particular sequence of words, it never occurs..

Given that Coordinated Universal Time existed well before UTC, I suspect
that the comma thing is a post hoc creation.

Not everything is English, folks. UTC is for Universale Temps
Coordinaire. No comma is implied or needed because in French, an
adjective follows the word it modifies, with very few exceptions.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Antenna for receiving WWV/10MHz: am I asking too much?
 

On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:43:53 -0700, Jim Lux
wrote:

The reason for the initials order is that there is an hidden comma.
Universal Time, Coordinated.

Funny, thing, though, that if one searches the literature of the time
for that particular sequence of words, it never occurs..

You are writing to one who read the literature - at that time. My
experience is not from arm chair history 101. UTC was arrived at as a
compromise between the French (naturally) and the "rest of the world"
(what else?). My bona fides are documented too: two diplomas from the
only Metrology school in the United States - at that time. Time in
service: with training in calibration and maintenance of the HP Cesium
Beam standard, and VLF subsystem - at that time. I also lived through
the great switch-over from cycles to hertz, and GMT to Zulu - at that
time (or slightly before... I wasn't looking at the clock that day).

I can flood this page with 250 references that employ the strict usage
of "Universal Time Coordinated" "Universal Time, Coordinated" or
"Universal Time (Coordinated)" and specifically 35 of them printed
before 1967. With google it takes more time to cut and paste than
actually find them. A short list includes:

Title 15 1971 Code of Federal Regulations By United States Office of
the Federal Register (1971)
"... the Universal Time Coordinated (UTC)
system' as recommended by the Bureau
International de l'Heure (bill).
The carrier offset currently is minus 300 ..."

Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts By American
Meteorological Society (1960)

International Aerospace Abstracts
By American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Technical
Information Service, United States National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, Institute of the Aerospace Sciences Technical
Information Service (1961)

Proceedings of the IEEE. By Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (1963)

Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports
By United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Scientific and Technical Information Division, United States National
Aeronautics and Space Administration. Scientific and Technical
Information Office, NASA Scientific and Technical Information
Facility, United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Scientific and Technical Information Branch, NASA Center for AeroSpace
Information, United States. National Aeronautics and Space
Administration. Office of Scientific and Technical Information (1963)

Navigation Dictionary By United States Naval Oceanographic Office
(1969)

New Scientist By EBSCO Publishing (1971)

Basic Electronic Instrument Handbook By Clyde F. Coombs (1972)

Newer titles:

UPI Style Book & Guide to Newswriting By Harold Martin, Bruce Cook

Dictionnaire des sciences et techniques du pétrole By Magdeleine
Moureau, Gerald Brace

Acronyms, Initialisms & Abbreviations Dictionary By Ellen T. Crowley

GPS Satellite Surveying By Alfred Leick

All of 10 minutes (give or take).

Familiar with any service acronyms like BFD?

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

Antenna for receiving WWV/10MHz: am I asking too much?
 

Richard Clark wrote:
On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:43:53 -0700, Jim Lux
wrote:


The reason for the initials order is that there is an hidden comma.
Universal Time, Coordinated.

Funny, thing, though, that if one searches the literature of the time
for that particular sequence of words, it never occurs..


You are writing to one who read the literature - at that time. My
experience is not from arm chair history 101. UTC was arrived at as a
compromise between the French (naturally) and the "rest of the world"
(what else?). My bona fides are documented too: two diplomas from the
only Metrology school in the United States - at that time. Time in
service: with training in calibration and maintenance of the HP Cesium
Beam standard, and VLF subsystem - at that time. I also lived through
the great switch-over from cycles to hertz, and GMT to Zulu - at that
time (or slightly before... I wasn't looking at the clock that day).

I can flood this page with 250 references that employ the strict usage
of "Universal Time Coordinated" "Universal Time, Coordinated" or
"Universal Time (Coordinated)" and specifically 35 of them printed
before 1967. With google it takes more time to cut and paste than
actually find them. A short list includes:



I defer to your googling skills..

I tried the search above, turned up nothing (other than obvious
derivative works like the wikipedia entry) in the first 10 pages of
hits, and took the references from BIH as definitive.

(I also tried WebOfScience, etc.)

I also didn't trust references from post, say, 1970, because by then,
you'd have seen definitions created by "back-formation" (i.e. finding
words that match the acronym.. which, when it comes right down to it, is
how lots of acronyms get created in the first place)



Proceedings of the IEEE. By Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (1963)

Looked for this one, and couldn't find it. Which month?
The oldest paper in Proceedings that has the term "universal time" in it
is Hudson's paper in June 1967, p815 ff

It refers to CCIR recommendation 374.1 and CCIR reports 365 (in 1965)
and 366 in connection with the discussion of UTC and SAT, but doesn't
actually define UTC, nor does it provide a reference to a defining
source. (other than a "in press" paper by Cord and Hudson, "Some trends
in UT")

Smith's paper in the Proceedings in May 1972, seems to provide a fairly
definitive history (page 481) citing the CCIR Study Group 7 Interim
meeting in 1962 and CCIR Xth Plenary Assembly in 1963 (Vol III, p193),
as well as an earlier recommendation of the IAU XIth General Assembly in
1961 ("Resolutions adopted by comm. 31" Trans IAU, Vol XI B(1961), p 329)



Familiar with any service acronyms like BFD?

Sure.. but this is really a Tiny FD..

But, I really would like to find a definitive printed reference, as
opposed to the recollections of folks present at the birth. Think of it
as something akin to the citations in the OED. Once you have that
golden reference, discussions like this one end in a hurry.

It's also because I'm casually interested in the obscure history of
things like this. A co-worker asked the other day, "Why is wine in 750ml
bottles, and when did it change from whatever they used before the
metric system existed?"... turns out it's actually a fairly recent
change. Another interesting discussion had to do with the use of
"transfer standards" when building the pyramids in Egypt: failure to
calibrate your working cubit against the standard within the calibration
interval was punishable by death. No "For indication only, out of cal"
stickers there, apparently. {I'm also looking for a definitive source
for that story...presumably it would be in hieroglypics.. as one can
imagine, though, there's a lot of very odd stuff out there when you
bring up anything ancient Egypt related)

Jim, W6RMK

Antenna for receiving WWV/10MHz: am I asking too much?
 

Roy Lewallen wrote in
:

Not everything is English, folks. UTC is for Universale Temps
Coordinaire. No comma is implied or needed because in French, an
adjective follows the word it modifies, with very few exceptions.

Then wouldn't it be Temps Universale Coordinaire?

Owen

Antenna for receiving WWV/10MHz: am I asking too much?
 

On Sun, 14 Oct 2007 17:13:57 -0700, Roy Lewallen wrote:
Frnak McKenney wrote:

Ah. So even if it starts out in vertically polarized in Fort
Collins 'way out thataway (he says, gesturing faintly west-ish)
WWV's signal might be polarized north-north-west by the time it gets
ro Richmond.

Not exactly. The wave will still be nearly planar, that is, the
orientation of the E field will be in a plane which is perpendicular to
a line between you and the effective point in the ionosphere where the
wave is coming from. But the E field can be rotated in any direction
within that plane. So you want your antenna to have substantial gain in
the direction of Fort Collins and at the elevation angle of the arriving
signal (the latter will vary somewhat). But the polarization is a crap
shoot.

So... I'd need a really crappy antenna? I think I have one around
here... grin!

Seriously, thanks for the description.

Hm. Wonder if anyone has built an antenna whose polarization shifts
to "best match" the incoming signal? (No, not _this_ weekend!
grin!)

Sure, many. Polarization diversity is an old idea. In a previous life I
worked on a phased array radar (cf.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/...an-fps-85.htm). The
transmitters have only horizontal dipole antennas so they transmit only
a horizontally polarized signal. But each of the 4660 receivers has two
dipole antennas, one vertical and one horizontal. This gives the
receiver information about whether an object is tumbling or rotating,
for example, by the way the polarization is shifted by the reflection.

Sounds like a really neat setup... on the other hand, it may be a
bit much for my poor MAC-II clock. Grin!

--snip premature self-back-patting--
How good? Well, I've unplugged the clock to reset it and it has
then received an "acceptable" WWV signal (it started showing digits)
eight times in the past two days.
--snip--

Be cautious in generalizing about your accomplishments. Day-to-day
propagation differences can be extreme. Unless you can do an immediate
A-B comparison or take many, many measurements over a very long period
of time, there's no way to distinguish between antenna and propagation
changes.

Um. I just noticed.

Yesterday I powered the clock off and added a "line out" jack so I
could record the received audio. I got distracted here and there,
and when I put it all back together I couldn't get WWV to save my
life. I finally ripped out my wiring, assuming I'd inadvertently run
a wore too close to the RF stuff... but even _that_ didn't help.
I'm now concluding that I reacted too rapidly, that the WWV signal
had simply faded into the background noise.

Seems to be true today as well. I re-added my wiring, and the
signal was unchanged (still rotten: bits and pieces of WWV tones
fading and returning a random-appearing basis). I can now record
long segments of bits of WWV... plus much louder bits of other
shortwave activity and assorted noise sources.

Ah, well. It'll be back some day. grin!

I do a lot of reading in comp.dsp (sometimes it's fun just watching
the phrases fly back and forth grin!), and one common topic there
is the difference between "noise" and "signal". For me, "signal" is
"what I want", "noise" is "everything else", and the fun(?) part is
figuring out how to get as much of the former as I can while
downplaying or being able to ignore the effects of the latter.
--snip--
The whole objective to receiving system design is to maximize the
signal/noise ratio, where "noise" is "everything you don't want". Making
both larger by the same amount accomplishes nothing you can't do with a
simple amplifier.

Yup.

Heath's algorithm, or at least my interpretation of it based on its
behavior, is to require clear reception -- from start to end -- of
complete TOD "frames", and to only statr the display running when
they're reallyREALLYsure they're locked in.

I have a feeling that one could do a more "statistical" approach and
get better results on poor signals. For example, it appears that
the MAC-II requires that, to be acceptable, a BCD TOD "bit" has to
have its start and end within certain time boundaries. On the other
hand, one could capture whatever bits of 100Hz tone were around and
attempt, over time, to fit them into a pattern and see if it matched
a valid WWV frame. You'd have to take into account that the
contentsof the frame (the TOD) would be changing during your
accumulation, but I think it makes more sense to strip and squeeze
every useful bit of information one can get out of what one _does_
receive rather than waiting for life (or propagation) to be nearly
perfect.

But that's for _next_ month. grin!


Frank
--
"We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your
brothers, the school, the teachers -- you can blame anyone but
never blame yourself. It's never your fault. But it's always
your fault, because if you wanted to change, you're the one
who has got to change. It's as simple as that, isn't it?"
--Katherine Hepburn
--
Frank McKenney, McKenney Associates
Richmond, Virginia / (804) 320-4887
Munged E-mail: frank uscore mckenney ayut minds pring dawt cahm (y'all)

Antenna for receiving WWV/10MHz: am I asking too much?
 

On Sun, 14 Oct 2007 17:20:32 -0700, Roy Lewallen wrote:
Frnak McKenney wrote:
--snip--
Still, my current indoor loop seems to be picking up a nice strong
signal. It was upright when I first started testing, but it wound up
being laid flat at some point in the past few days -- about the time
I discovered that I had been mis-tuining it. Wonder which had more
effect: my changes, or atmospherics? grin!

As I mentioned in my other recent posting, there's no way for you to tell.

I noticed. Yesterday all those really clear tones and voice
segments vanished while I wasn't paying attention. I can still hear
enough WWV on occasion to know it's still there, but it's not even
close to being strong enough to start the clock running.

Anyway, thank you for your time and suggestions. I did some looking
around on the 'web for introductory material to help me understand
the ARRL Antenna Handbook and stumbled onto these:

Antenna Newcomers and the Language of Antennas
http://www.cebik.com/tales/nc.html

Antennas from the Ground Up
http://www.cebik.com/gup/groundup.html

Some really nice propagation plots. Now, if there were just some
simple way of figuring out which way the antenna is oriented
relative to the plots... "It's an imperfect universe" grin!

You can duplicate the plots for the kinds of simple antennas you're
dealing with, with the free demo version of EZNEC available from
http://eznec.com. In the View Antenna display, select View/Objects, then
check the "2D Display" box. Then you'll see a 2D plot superimposed on
the view of the antenna, to show how the two are related. When viewing a
3D plot, the View Antenna display rotates along with the 3D pattern, so
you can see how they're related if you keep both windows open.

Thanks for the pointer; I didn't knwo that there was a free version
available. I'll check it out when I get a chance


Frank
--
"Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated.
You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."
-- David Lloyd George, British Statesman
--
Frank McKenney, McKenney Associates
Richmond, Virginia / (804) 320-4887
Munged E-mail: frank uscore mckenney ayut minds pring dawt cahm (y'all)

Antenna for receiving WWV/10MHz: am I asking too much?
 

On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:06:49 -0700, Jim Lux wrote:
Frnak McKenney wrote:

Hm. Wonder if anyone has built an antenna whose polarization shifts
to "best match" the incoming signal? (No, not _this_ weekend!
grin!)

Yes, such things have been built. There are some French researchers who
built an adaptive combiner that combined multiple polarizations, and
also did the processing to allow using both the ordinary and
extraordinary ray, and substantially improved link reliability on 1000km
skywave paths.

Neat!

A minor update: It seems that I was _mis_tuning my antenna,
adjusting it for the strongest signal (highest stack of LEDs lit).
Over the past two days either I've finally tuned it _correctly_ or
I've done that _and_ the signal has improved. Whatever the
cause(s), I can now -- at times, in fact for an hour at a time --
hear the tocks fairly clearly and even understand the voice. (Who
knew the announcer's phrase for UTC "Coordinated Universal Time"?).

UTC is not an acronym. It's a madeup identifier that matches neither
the English (Coordinated Universal Time) or the French (T U C.. I won't
even attempt to figure out what it is..).

Thanks for the background. Mostly, I was just impressed to hear
_any_ recognizable voice coming out of the MAC-II's speaker after
all this time; the announcer could have said "Washington Standard
Time" and I'd have been impressed. grin!

These sorts of international metrology things have all sorts of such
negotiated compromises in them, stemming all the way back to the Prime
Meridian being in Greenwich, but measuring in meters.

Um. That would be in... "chrono" meters, right? grin!


Frank
--
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we
stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of
heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against
it, -- but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
--
Frank McKenney, McKenney Associates
Richmond, Virginia / (804) 320-4887
Munged E-mail: frank uscore mckenney ayut minds pring dawt cahm (y'all)

Antenna for receiving WWV/10MHz: am I asking too much?
 

On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:02:59 -0700, Tim Shoppa wrote:
On Oct 14, 12:34 pm, Frnak McKenney
wrote:
On Sat, 13 Oct 2007 17:27:01 -0700, Tim Shoppa wrote:
Frnak McKenney wrote:
I'm in Richmond, Virginia and I'm trying to noticeably improve my
reception of WWV's 10MHz signal from Fort Collins, Colorado. It all
seemed so simple, two weeks ago: wind some wire, solder a
connector, and Hey...presto! a clean WWV signal. grin!
--snip--

Thanks for your signal report and the antenna suggestion. I'll keep
it in mind.

On the other hand, my tuned (and currently horizontal) loop is
suddenly picking up WWV/10MHz remarkably reliably, and I didn't even
have to "sacrifice a goat at midnight"! grin

Has your reception improved lately as well (last few days)?

Don't know about WWV in particular, but this past weekend on the ham
bands there was an obvious uptick in propogation conditions. The MUF
was up enough that I heard several pileups on 15 meters and 40 and 30
Meters were more hopping than usual in mid-day/early evening.

Well, I hope it continued for everyone else, but for me the WWV
signal has faded back into obscurity. I can occasionally hear
small, dim fragments of its former glory, and that for only 10-20
seconds at a time.

I guess I really should have sacrificed that goat. grin?


Frank
--
"...each new generation born is in effect an invasion of
civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized
before it is too late." -- Thomas Sowell
--
Frank McKenney, McKenney Associates
Richmond, Virginia / (804) 320-4887
Munged E-mail: frank uscore mckenney ayut minds pring dawt cahm (y'all)

Antenna for receiving WWV/10MHz: am I asking too much?
 

Owen Duffy wrote:
Roy Lewallen wrote in
:

Not everything is English, folks. UTC is for Universale Temps
Coordinaire. No comma is implied or needed because in French, an
adjective follows the word it modifies, with very few exceptions.

Then wouldn't it be Temps Universale Coordinaire?

Good point. This should be reported to the French language police!

Roy Lewallen, W7EL