Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Intermezzo #50: MSF 60 kHz Outages (Atomic Time Signal UK)

Just in case you live in the UK and have problems with receiving the Atomic Time signal lately, The transmitter (MSF) has been out of service for maintenance. I think the German transmitter can be perfectly received in the south f the UK, so most Atomic models will pick up the signal, but not as easy as you are used to.
Above is the message from the National Physics Laboratory, who is responsible for the time signal broadcasting in Anthorn. You can also see the scheduled dates for maintenance further in 1012 and 2013.

3 comments:

Konafan said...

hey Sjors,

great blog, lots to learn here. My friend who is a satellite engineer thinks wireless syncing to a local atomic clock is a bit silly when there are GPS satellites orbiting above our heads. Maybe a future G module will feature a GPS sync!

Me, I like the idea of owning an atomic solar G but I have to think about it...my girlfriend is currently in Australia which doesn't have atomic reception and I'm in the UK which doesn't get much solar reception :)

Unknown said...

For a long time I also assumed that GPS time was the same as atomic time, but it actually isn't, although it's still pretty close. The difference between Atomic Time and GPS time is that Atomic Time is corrected for minimal fluctuations in the Earth rotation and GPS signal isn't. Since the GPS system is set up in 1980, there have been apparently 15 leap seconds until today (April 13th 2012).

I have always wondered why Australia didn't have one or two public transmitters, but I think it has to do with the spread of the population in Australia. A big transmitter (like the Fort Collins transmitter) in Brisbane and/or a smaller transmitter in Perth would cover a quite large part of the Australian population.

Cheers,

Sjors

Unknown said...

I just saw that June 30th 2012 has a leap second. The first one in 4 years.

http://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/bulc/bulletinc.dat

Cheers,

Sjors