[time-nuts] WWVB Now a Monopoly

[Dennis Ferguson]

On 26 Sep, 2012, at 10:03 , J. Forster wrote:

> You go after everything. Soup to nuts, including the contract agreements.
> 
> IMO, this is potentially very, very big money, because Xtendwave may also
> have patent protection, and henceforth control all the precise digital
> clock market. This is tens of millions of units, at least.

They claim to have applied for patents on something but I would be
surprised if they could patent anything that would prevent anyone
from designing their own receiver.

What would annoy me is less-than-full disclosure of the transmitted
signal and its properties.  For example, there's a claim in the paper
that the (31 26) Hamming code used can detect double-bit errors in the
encoded time.  I think detecting double-bit errors would require an
additional parity bit, and that the assertion in the paper is just a
boo-boo, but I also keep wondering if the claim might in fact be true,
that there might be a really clever way to use that with something else
in the signal to detect double-bit errors, and the paper just isn't
pointing that out.  That would be annoying.

Dennis Ferguson