[LEAPSECS] At The Tone

[Steve Allen]

I'm in the middle of listening to "At The Tone", a CD full of
recordings of the signals that National Bureau of Standards broadcast
on short wave stations WWV and WWVH.

http://dodgeblog.nfshost.com/wordpress/?p=435
http://www.myke.me/

This is golden stuff for shortwave time nuts.
It contains records of service changes, service failures, and
implicitly the technological and political forces which drove them.

It has the change from local standard time as UT2 (first Eastern, then
Mountain as the station moved from Maryland to Colorado) and then to
GMT rather than try to follow the 1966 law mandating daylight time.
It has the announcement of a 4 hour interruption in broadcasts.
It has numerous recordings of the Morse code broadcasts of the difference
between the broadcast time and UT2.
It has the 1973 announcements acknowledging that despite the voice
announcments saying GMT the signals were already UTC, and the change
as of 1974.

Alas, what it does not have is a recording of the first leap second.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
UCO/Lick Observatory        Natural Sciences II, Room 165    Lat  +36.99855
University of California    Voice: +1 831 459 3046           Lng -122.06015
Santa Cruz, CA 95064        http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/     Hgt +250 m