[time-nuts] GOES Satellite update, 1

Tom Van Baak tvb at leapsecond.com
Sat May 7 19:20:22 UTC 2005


Many of you know the Truetime / Kinemetrics 468-DC
series of GOES satellite time & frequency receivers.
These delivered sub-millisecond accurate time. Over
the past 5 years a lot of GOES gear has appeared on
the surplus market as users move to GPS for precise
time.

After 30 years of timecode broadcast NIST and
NOAA have pulled the plug in this service (but all
the other GOES services, such as weather maps,
are still active, of course).

There's an excellent recent GOES paper at:

The GOES Time Code Service, 1974-2004: A Retrospective
http://nvl.nist.gov/pub/nistpubs/jres/110/2/j110-2lom.pdf

Anyway, in spite of the 12/31/2004 ending date, and
after a few weeks of going on and off, the GOES/East
satellite is still broadcasting a timecode; and a 468-DC
will still successfully lock (though the time is now
off by a total of 124 ms).

Something pretty interesting happened this week so
my first question is -- how many of you got a GOES
receiver to lock this year (2005), and do any of you
have one running right now?

/tvb
http://www.LeapSecond.com
http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/goes/







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