I spent 6 years at sea using WWV, sunset was the worse for tuning. Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry -----Original Message----- From: Scott Tilley <sthed475@telus.net> Sender: seesat-l-bounces+fvalcho=yahoo.com@satobs.org Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:05:36 To: <seesat-l@satobs.org> Subject: Re: Time ticks on a computer Hi Jay / Group I've watched this thread with interest. Most off the shelf travel shortwave receivers will do the job fine, IF you attach an external wire as the antenna AND use the appropriate band given the time of day and solar/ionospheric conditions. Generally speaking in the evening use 10 and 5Mhz and night focus on 5 and maybe 2.5Mhz. With elevated solar condx even 15MHz may work at night for quite awhile. Tune all the time freqs and find the highest one that is working best for you. If it starts to fade out tune DOWN to the next one, etc etc... Given experience you'll know which is best given the time of day and condx. Now the next issue will be local noise etc, locate the radio and antenna away from electronics and other sources of near field noise for best results, car electronics can be bad news and so can energy saving light bulbs and lights on dimmers nearby! I use this method when observing from a site that is impractical to use my video system. I run the shortwave in the background and set my little digital audio recorder by the speaker. When an event occurs I call it out using 'keywords' to jog my memory later about what they meant with respect to position of the object in question. Passersby think I'm nuts throwing wire into trees but it works... Earlier someone mentioned using a GPS receiver with a 1pps output. Buffer the output (use a CMOS gate or even a transistor to protect the internal circuitry of the GPS and provide a suitable drive for the transducer) of the 1pps signal from the GPS to drive any convenient transducer to produce a clearly audible second time pulse, a Piezo transducer element may work nice... Alas, you don't get a minute mark etc which leads back to the shortwave option for one that provides a complete time code for later retrieval and easy recording with minimal gear... Good luck! Scott Tilley ROBERTS CREEK 1: 8049 ST 49.4348 -123.6685 40. Scott Tilley ROBERTS CREEK 2: 8048 ST 49.4175 -123.6420 1. Scott Tilley On 11/9/2011 5:07 PM, JAY RESPLER wrote: > Can you recommend a program for a Windows XP computer that has a voice > to announce the time every minute and sound a tick every second, similar > to WWV/CHU ? > The closest program I have found does give the voice each minute but > gives only 1 tick per minute. > > Thanks, > _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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