jimlux@earthlink.net said:

I was thinking of measuring the results, and maybe comparing various
receivers if I get that far.

"Good enough" for me would be to see the change in prop delay from night to
day.

I listened to WWV as a kid.  I think my father told me about it.  (We had a
good collection of old tube radios.)

Roughly 40 years ago, a friend showed me a NBS booklet describing a scheme
for distributing time via TV.  I forget the details.  It was a cooperative
project with one of the major networks.  NBS published the propagation delays
which changed occasionally as the phone companies providing the underlying
links rerouted things.

This is an IEEE article from 1972 that looks like a good fit:
Nationwide Precise Time and Frequency
Distribution Utilizing an Active Code Within
Network Television Broadcasts
DAVID A. HOWE
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3092613

--
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.

FYI: for the original spam-free version, please use:

https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/469.pdf

In general, if the author or paper is related to NIST, the original copyright-free PDF will be available in the NIST Time and Frequency Publication Database. That easily searchable database, and the thousands of papers it contains, is probably the greatest asset we time nuts have. For those of you that don't know it yet, check it out:

https://tf.nist.gov/general/publications.htm

As a non-academic working from home one of the greatest frustrations is getting copies of old and new scientific articles. NIST seems to be the rare exception. Decade after decade, administration after administration, that database keeps working.

Me too, which is why it's so frustrating to deal with web sites that scrap free PDF's and then serve them to you for a price or with a side of spam. There are even web sites that serve all our time-nuts postings along with injected targeted ads.

/tvb

Hi

Back in the era when the network stations all “went direct” to the mothership for their
signal, all the sync pulses ultimately could be traced back to network HQ. That changed
when local frame buffers (and other forms of translation) became the “way to do it”. The
TV based sync timing survived in the Washington DC area longer than the rest of the
country. It may even still be active …..

Bob

On 30 March 2018 at 06:49, Tom Van Baak tvb@leapsecond.com wrote:

That's useful to know.

I have been in contact with someone at NPL, who provided papers by either

1. Attaching a copy.
2. Mentioning it was on Research Gate - a site I personally find annoying.
3. A link to IEEE (or similar), which will has a paywall.

This suggests to me NPL don't have all their papers available online,
although at least some can be found at

http://www.npl.co.uk/publications/

For anyone interested in metrology, and I assume that includes everyone on
this list, this NPL publication,

"A beginner's guide to uncertainty of measurement." by Stephanie Bell

http://www.npl.co.uk/publications/a-beginners-guide-to-uncertainty-in-measurement

is well worth a read. This is far more readable than "Guide to the
expression of uncertainty in measurement (GUM)", which is heavy going.

You obviously share the same frustrations as Alexandra Elbakyan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan

Because of her inability to get some papers, she set up sci-hub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

Alexandra Elbakyan makes the very valid point that authors do not get paid
for submitting papers, reviewers do not get paid for reviewing them, yet
the publishers charge significant amounts of money for distribution of
electronic copies of papers. This is VERY different to books or music,
where authors get royalties from copies sold.

You can debate the ethics of sci-hub, with many scientists having strong
and opposing views on sci-hub. The site does allow one to get virtually any
academic paper for free. There are no ads, but donations are accepted by
bitcoin - which reminds me, I must set up a bitcoin wallet so I can donate
to sci-hub.

Dave

On Sat, 31 Mar 2018 12:25:34 +0100
"Dr. David Kirkby" drkirkby@kirkbymicrowave.co.uk wrote:

And just to drive another nail into this coffin:
Writing an easy paper takes something like a week (after the research
is done). Writing a difficult one can easily take one or two months until
it's in a form that can be understood. Reviewing takes anything between
half a day (easy, experimental paper) to a week (100 pages of proofs),
for each reviewer! Then there is the guy in India who gets paid a dollar
a day to make the paper's layout fit the journals general rules (and often
botches the whole paper in the process, to the point where the author has
to prohibit its publication). If you want to have it as Open Access, then
publication can cost anything between 1000€ and 5000€, depending on the
publisher and journal. In most countries, that in the order of a months
salary... for what? So far, the only value I have seen, that these
publishers provide is the organisation of double blind reviews.
Everything else is just make pretend. There is not even have any form
of quality control of the reviews. Heck, I've seen one line reviews of
the form "This paper is stuipd." And I am not talking yet about the
butchoring they do in the name of editing (like replacing minus signs
with dashes or changing the number format such that you cannot distinguish
between a decimal separator and an item separator).

They demand you to use their LaTeX template. They check whether
you "optimized" it upon upload, and that's it. Yes, their Open Access
fee is still significant, though lower than most others. But at least
they do not pretend to know better than the authors how to format a
paper. And, unlike Springer and Elsevier, IEEE does not seem to care
when an author puts their own papers on their website (though, officially
the copyright asignment prohibits that).

I don't like that sci-hub has to work in a legal dark gray area.
But the way publishers work these days, borders on extortion and is
IMHO a big waste of tax money (we are talking about several 10's of
millions per year, country and publisher). Honestly, I couldn't care
less if Springer and Elsevier would go bancrupt and didn't exist
anymore, if it wouldn't be for the papers they hold hostage, which
would become completely inaccessible over night. As such, I am glad
that the Open Access movement has got so much traction these days.
It gives me hope that in future, our knowledge will be accessible
to everyone, not just a select few who can afford the fees.

As a researcher, I do not really care where my paper is published,
as long as people can read it (the more people read my paper,
the better). A paper published at a venue that actively seeks
to prevent people from reading papers (I am looking at you, ION!)
is a place I will not publish at. And from personal experience
I can say that it's much more likely that easily available papers
get cited than one that is behind an inpenetrable pay-wall.

		Attila Kinali

--
<JaberWorky> The bad part of Zurich is where the degenerates
throw DARK chocolate at you.