[pianotech] Unusual Tuning fork (David Lawson)

[paul bruesch]

Wasn't it, “This is WWV, Fort Collins, Colorado. (small pause) The next tone
begins at (short pause) X hours, X minutes, *Greenwich Mean Time*” ?? It's
been a long time since I've heard it, but I used to listen to it for
hours... well, maybe for ten minutes... at a time!!

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 9:31 AM, Larry Fisher RPT <larryf at pacifier.com>wrote:

>   Hello David,
>
> How’s things going for ya??
>
> My first thought is it’s a frequency standard for radio work.  It’s not big
> enough for 100 cps so I don’t know what that number is.  I’ll forward this
> over to my brother who at the age of 12 built his own ham radio
> transmitter.
>
> In the olde days you had to “align” receivers by tuning the “IF cans” so
> that they’d operate at their optimum.  A frequency standard was used to
> accomplish this.  Station WWV was the source for this.  At various places on
> the ham radio dial you could find this station located just outside
> Wellington, CO.  Every minute they’d announce the geophysically correct
> time.  A tone would pulse every second for 50 seconds and then the
> announcement would take 10 seconds to complete.  After many hours of working
> with this radio source in my youth, I can still remember the announcement.
>
> “This is WWV, Fort Collins, Colorado. (small pause) The next tone begins at
> (short pause) X hours, X minutes.”  Then there’d be another short pause and
> the first tone would be slightly longer than the others.  At 30 seconds
> there was a double click I think.
>
> The “metric” version of this was CHU CANADA, announced in French.
>
> Regardless, it looks like someone needed an electromechanical frequency
> standard.  20 years ago they could have produced a solid state version of
> this but I guess there were some stability issues to deal with.
>
> Lar
>
>
>
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