Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!pacbell.com!ucsd!ucbvax!udel.edu!Mills
From: Mills@udel.edu
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.time.ntp
Subject: Re:  'time' for war
Message-ID: <9101181354.aa20488@huey.udel.edu>
Date: 18 Jan 91 18:54:18 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: inet
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Mark,

A LORAN-C receiver is not a common household item in a Bedouin tent.
I am no authority on national peculiarities of local timetelling
other than to observe that in those places I have visited the
clocks on the wall do not violate the Principle of Least Astonishment.

Usually, in faraway places, the most important client for good time
is the maritime navigation community. Most serious seafaring nations
and high-seas naval services broadcast timing pips at least once per
day from coastal communications stations. The frequencies and times
of these broadcasts are shown in ITU publications and, in some cases,
in the World Radio and TV Handbook published yearly. While I have
not been able to confirm this, I have observed the five pips
broadcast throughout the BBC services just before the hour are right
on-tick relative to UTC. If I can figure out a way to extract their
timing precisely, I may be able to figure out the relay routes. I
have done that for some VOA circuits.

Officially, time coordination throughout the international participants
is done by the Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris. There should
be some sort of explanatory document available from them. As far as the
Bedouin and Hindu are concerned, from what I fathom, these countries
are at low latitudes relative to those we are most familiar with. At
such latitueds the sun rises and sets pretty much the same time 6h-18h
local time throughout the year and the sunlight comes on and goes off
quickly. The only real need for more accurate time than that is to know
when to turn the shortwave radio on.

Dave