In commemoration of its 50th anniversary of broadcasting from Fort Collins, Colorado, this paper provides a history of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) radio station WWVB. The narrative describes the evolution of the station, from its origins as a source of standard frequency, to its current role as the source of time-of-day synchronization for many millions of radio controlled clocks.
The Time and Frequency Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the United States Department of Commerce (DOC), was tasked with fulfilling Section 4, Part (i) of the Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) Executive Order that was signed by the President on February 12, 2020. The Executive Order states that Within 180 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Commerce shall make available a GNSS-independent source of Coordinated Universal Time, to support the needs of critical infrastructure owners and operators, for the public and private sectors to access. Although the Executive Order does not specifically provide an accuracy requirement, this report assumes an accuracy requirement of 1 ?s with respect to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This specification is assumed because numerous critical infrastructure timing systems in the United States are now heavily dependent on signals received from the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites that routinely provide sub-microsecond accuracy, and other UTC sources that deliver time at comparable accuracy levels are needed to alleviate or reduce these dependencies. This report was written to describe, propose, and recommend technical methods that NIST has already implemented, or can potentially implement, to fulfill Section 4, Part (i) of the PNT Executive Order.
and Gene Fornario, the founder and co-moderator respectively of the Casio Waveceptor forum on Yahoo.com; Tom O'Brian, Chief of the NIST Time and Frequency Division; and David Smith, Chairman of the Editorial Review Board at NIST's Boulder laboratories. We also thank all those who have called and e-mailed NIST in recent years and shared their personal experiences with radio controlled clock (RCC) products. Their questions and comments inspired us to create this guide. vi ◆ WWVB Radio Controlled Clocks vii Table of Contents ◆
WWV was established as a radio station on October 1, 1919, with the issuance of
the call letters by the U.S. Department of Commerce. This paper will observe the
upcoming 100th anniversary of that event by exploring the events leading to the
founding of WWV, the various early experiments and broadcasts, its official debut as
a service of the National Bureau of Standards, and its role in frequency and time
dissemination over the past century.
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