[LEAPSECS] happy anniversary pips

[Richard Clark]

I'm surprised that someone on the list hasn't already pointed this out.

Today February 5 2014 (already yesterday in much of the world) marks
the 90th anniversary of the BBC's time pips as we know them.

I had been thinking about broadcast time signals recently. Here in the
USA we just experienced another State of the Union address. The most
interesting part of this event is the opportunity to compare the same
programming stream going out simultaneously on numerous tv channels and
radio stations. I found variation in lag between various sources of 10
seconds or more. The 'earliest' source seemed to be a local NPR station,
although I did not include the off-the-air signals from local tv stations.
I got those from Direct TV.

Digital buffering and decoding delays seem to be more randum than the
distribution of leap seconds.

Richard Clark
rclark at noao.edu