Wednesday, December 29, 2010

WWVB and Radio Controlled Clocks: Social engineering ?

I've been watching the reviews and comments on atomic clocks for a number of years and from the user end there is a distinct pattern.

All of a sudden, people across the country will report the stoppage of the self-setting of their clocks, or it will be come very spotty.

Then, the buying starts. You'll see the reviews pop up on the different sites. Even if they don't reference this, as someone with reliable clocks from a few brands, it's obvious.

When this occurs, WWVB becomes rock solid for months until this cycle starts anew. Do the people whose clocks "broke" ever go back and compare them to be sure they did break, reset them or pop the batteries out ?

Is this one of two MIC stunts ?

1. A social engineering experiment to see if this part of the MIC can control people's buying habits. Does the consumer wait patiently or jump the shark.

2. A simple MIC stunt to get you to keep the clock companies in business by buying new clocks thinking yours are broken, or that newer ones will be better. This of course is the measurement of how useful WWV and its employees are, especially after Congress threatened cuts to WWVB a few years ago given NTP and GPS.

For the number of engineers that have told me that the WWVB signal is not impacted by lightning or solar activity, it is clear that there is some issue here because these lapses, seen by virtually everyone at once, are almost never (99 percent) the result of posted outages.

I'm going to listen to an independent engineer before someone beholden to tax money. I like to use WWVB and WWV, but if games are being played, it's just more of the same "gimme grants" bologna.

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