[time-nuts] WWV/WWVH audio simulator?

[Jim Lux]

On 1/6/14 9:44 PM, Magnus Danielson wrote:
> Jim,
>
> On 07/01/14 05:43, Jim Lux wrote:
>> On 1/6/14 8:36 PM, Magnus Danielson wrote:
>>> Bob,
>>>
>>> It works the other way around. The standard Bell handset (103A I believe
>>> the designation was) has the 300-3400 Hz response, and with not so fancy
>>> analogue filtering, you can handle 4 kHz and thus 8 kHz sampling rate.
>>> The ITU-T G.711 A-law (where naturally the americans wanted their own,
>>> so u-law appeared) does non-linear pseudo-dynamic compression into 8
>>> bits. T1s cram 24 channels into one frame, and adding 1 bit for framing,
>>> giving 24*8+1=193 bits per frame, giving the 1544 kb/s rate. 193 being a
>>> prime have caused a bit of headache over the years. In Europe, cramming
>>> 30 channels into a bundle was preferred, and allowing 2 bytes for
>>> framing and signalling. In T1, you do signalling by bit-stealing every
>>> 6th LSB on a channel. Caused some grey hairs for modem designers back in
>>> the day, and followed along over into the ISDN, as the primary rates was
>>> over E1 and T1. T1 also had three different line-encodings, of which
>>> only one was really transparent to all binary combinations.
>>>
>>> Oh the joy of early digital telephony. Many lessons where hard to learn.
>>> Synchronization was only one of them.
>>
>> Don't forget the length of ATM cells.. 53 bytes.. because of how big
>> France is.
>
> No, that's not it. It's a design-by-committee thing. As I recall it, the
> Europeans wanted a 32 byte payload, as then you throw in a 32-byte E1
> into it, but this was judged to small for datacom which the North
> American side wanted, that wanted a 64 byte payload. Since no agreement
> could be done, they went half-way and made it 48 bytes payload, so both
> would be equally annoyed. Toss a 5 byte header that people where
> agreeing on and we have the lovely 53 byte (prime number again!) ATM
> cell size.

And why did Europe want 32 byte payloads?  Because they were small 
enough that they wouldn't need echo suppressors for "within country" 
links, while 64 was too long.  In the US, they were already stuck with 
5000 km paths and needed echo suppressors even at the long length.

I believe that at the time, France was the country with the longest 
point to point (via wire) distance, so they were the rate limiter.