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WPM to BPS calculation
On Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:09:24 EDT, AF6AY wrote:
In 1960, while working in the Standards Lab of Ramo-Wooldridge Corp. in Canoga Park, CA, Errrr, Len, the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation went out of existence in 1958 when it merged with Thompson Products to become Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc. Remember that I started with the "original" R-W in 1957 and was employed by them at the time of the merger at the former El Segundo Boulevard facilities (I never did get to work at the Arbor Vitae Street facilities which were the headquarters of the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division). They didn't move to Canoga Park until the late fall of 1959, and I was laid off (for the second time) in June of 1960. Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc - later TRW, Inc. - went on an acquisitions binge and itself went out of existence in 2002 when the electronics and aerospace parts were acquired by Grumman (now Northrop Grumman) and the automotive parts mostly by Goodyear. In context - RW was always friendly to ham radio, and the pre-merger RW Corp. actually let us scrounge both new and recycled parts for ham rigs and audio projects which became our property as long as we signed a register/release stating what we were building. I got to pull some OT on Saturdays to measure the difference between east coast transmissions of WWV and the local General Radio frequency standard. Just a plain old quartz crystal standard oscillator driving divider chains to the built-in clock. While at the El Segundo Blvd. facility we had a project of measuring distance to a transmitter using the time delay of HF transmissions received at different sites with a calibrated link between them (azimuth was easy using standard DF techniques) and we used the GR frequency standard referenced above. Using WWV was too error-prone. I would record the microseconds of difference between local clock ticks and WWV ticks from the east coast. Not much variation in a week's time, don't remember just how much (it was 48 years ago). My references about time differences, BTW, was to the time of day, i.e the time of the tick, not the interval between the ticks. GPS has a very noticeable offset compared to NIST. I guess that it's only nuts like me that care about that. My early training as a broadcast studio engineer while I was in engineering school required timing of program starts and endings to the second. "Dead air" was not permitted. Three o'clock did not mean three o'clock plus 1 second - the Western Union clock reset pulse on the hour was broadcast as a "beep". From my other hobby, "railroad accuracy" of watches (which are compared with a master clock at the start of a shift) requires one second per day, 30 seconds per month. Easy to do with quartz watches nowadays. There even used to be a SP Railroad dial-up number (now long gone) where the "time man" would announce the time "Southern Pacific Standard Time is ...." as contrasted to Ma Bell's "time lady" who would announce "Pacific Standard Time is ..." -- 73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon e-mail: k2asp [at] arrl [dot] net |
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