WWVB Celebrates 50 Years of Broadcasting Time 97
First time accepted submitter doublebackslash writes "On July 5th, WWVB, NIST's timekeeping radio station transmitting near Fort Collins, will celebrate 50 years of continuous operation. Operating at 60kHz, the signal actually follows the curvature of the Earth via a trick of electromagnetics, allowing nearly the entire globe to receive an accurate time signal, which has in recent years reached an accuracy of 1 part in 70 trillion. Recent upgrades, which came in $15.9 million under budget will allow the station to be better received even in large buildings, giving it an edge on timekeeping that not even GPS can touch, with its need for open skies to receive a signal."
Quite the understatement (Score:4, Insightful)
" $15.9 million under budget"
Sure that'd be be a nice change for some billion dollar government project - to run a little under instead of doubling the budget,
But this was a budget of $16 million...
Re:How Accurate? ... Right (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it can't. The Earth's circumference is about 25,000 miles, which means that nothing can be more than 12,500 miles away by the shortest route. Considering that the speed of light is roughly 186,000 miles/second, the maximum propagation delay is about 67.2 ms.