sraacke
Regular Member
KC5SAS checking in here. Tech since 1995 and currently the RACES officer for Iberville Parish OEP in Louisiana.
So maybe you can explain to me (and all the hams on here who are wondering) why NIST's "WWV" and "WWVH" stations are dropping their geophysical weather reports from their transmissions in September... If were heading into what looks like an irregularly low "solar cycle peak" you'd think that they would want to keep than info beaming out to the public and to hams.
The excuse that NIST, NASA and NOAA are giving for dropping the geophysical weather reports is that they are already doing it on their website, and feel that broadcast of this information is needlessly redundant...
I'm wondering what the REAL reason is. Our government NEVER stops doing something because it's "redundant"...
The only reason, historically, that the government changed modes of information dissemination is because they are trying to control said information more tightly.
Notice how NOAA weather on VHF is now just a text-to-speech system with a human voice heard only occasionally. There is far more geomagnetic weather info available on the Internet today than I ever heard on WWV..
So explain to me how, after a Katrina-like incident when there is no power or internet in a specific zone for MONTHS, a website is going to be of any value to field-operating hams under emergency conditions?
That's all I'm saying...
So explain to me how, after a Katrina-like incident when there is no power or internet in a specific zone for MONTHS, a website is going to be of any value to field-operating hams under emergency conditions?
That's all I'm saying...
Not an issue for me. I regularly post under my real name on several forums and even on those forums where I use YALE as my screen name most members know my real name. I'm not here hiding from anyone./tin foil hat
If people want to know who you are, what you post, etc. then posting your callsign is a sure way to freely give that information away.
I would suggest against posting your callsign, as it makes identification that much easier.
There's always winlink. http://www.winlink.org/So explain to me how, after a Katrina-like incident when there is no power or internet in a specific zone for MONTHS, a website is going to be of any value to field-operating hams under emergency conditions?
That's all I'm saying...
Notice how NOAA weather on VHF is now just a text-to-speech system with a human voice heard only occasionally. There is far more geomagnetic weather info available on the Internet today than I ever heard on WWV. It was cool 30 years ago. I think that just like they say, the agency is cutting expenses because more detailed and numerous info dissemination methods have become available.
In any case, hams themselves do plenty of propagation predictions and reports, such as SolarHam and the K7RA Solar Update on arrl.org. Info about what's happening on the sun - at least in terms of effects on radio propagation, would surely keep coming even in the event of outages of Internet-provided services.
I wouldn't be surprised if WWV went away at some point too, but would miss it. Great as a precise 10 MHz reference for tweaking the master oscillator of my older HF transceiver. It used to be people set clocks by the top of the minute beep on WWV, but for instance, I now use a specialized GPS receiver connected to a Linux box running a patched low-latency kernel, keeping its clock set to that same time standard to an accuracy of a microsecond or two.