Re: Shortwave radio for WWV

Art Allen, KY1K (aballen@colby.edu)
Thu, 29 Apr 1999 10:26:48 -0400

At 05:43 AM 04/29/1999 -0500, you wrote:
>Please recommend an inexpensive (less than $100 US) shortwave radio that I
>could use to listen to the time broadcast over WWV. Thank you.


Rob,

If you REALLY need to listen with your ears to wwv, I cannot help you.

However, IF you need accurate time with a radio receiver in North America,
I believe my comments below might be useful.

Listmembers, please be aware of the Radio Shack Atomic Clock, recently
lowered to 40 dollars selling price (part # 63-970). This unit has a nasty
limitation in that it doesn't do UTC and that it only does the 5 time zones
associated with North America (local time). If you can live with these
limitations, this unit might be the right choice for you.

This clock receives 60 khz wwvb signals from Colorado. It claims an
accuracy of one tenth of a second and my own observation is that it is much
better than this (I have 2 of them and run them side by side). I've also
disconnected the receiver antenna and allowed them to run without time sync
signals-based on my observations, I conclude that they are temperature
compensated and that they are 'smart' regarding firmware tweaking of the
displayed time.

I haven't hacked the display module yet, but might do so soon-it might be
possible to do all kinds of neat things with these units depending how they
are constructed.

I keep thinking of new aps for them everyday-and pressure is mounting for a
controlled exploratory operation to evaluate how hackable they are!

Has anyone hacked into these units or done any reverse engineering?

Just wanted everyone to know, the Shack might have similar units for use in
EU and Asia as I know there are other time signal transmitters out there.

Regards and GL to all....

Art

FN54hm