You may have heard that tests are determining whether 60 Hz power line accuracy will be relaxed.
http://radiomagonline.com/infrastructure/power/60hz-stability-going-away-0627/
You may have heard that tests are determining whether 60 Hz power line accuracy will be relaxed.
http://radiomagonline.com/infrastructure/power/60hz-stability-going-away-0627/
How will Part 15 operation be impacted by less accurate Power frequency?
Well…
Unless your station is running on a lamp timer, I’d assume not much.
I wonder if the different line freq. can cause tape decks and turntables to run slightly slower than they should.
Computers are set via internet time to our station clocks should be ok.
60 Hz Reference
Years ago I toured the American Electric Power central office in Columbus, Ohio and was shown the 60 Hz frequency control center for the U.S. east of the Rocky mountains which is housed in their building. I was told that the frequency did vary but they compared the time resulting from 60 Hz clocks with WWV time and adjusted it up and down so the average frequency was 60 Hz. I don’t recall the tolerance they allowed, just that on average they maintained 60 Hz.
In the good old days, it was necessary to keep the generators synchronized so power could flow over the grid hence the need for a central coordination facility. Both the phase and hence frequency has to be closely controlled or power cannot flow properly in a grid. With the advent of ultra high voltage transmission lines which operate at DC this requirement is relaxed and this may be the reason the frequency control can be loosened.
For a while scientific labs and others used the color burst reference of the NTSC signals from the TV networks where the 3.579545 MHz was maintained by a rubidium clock. This has been supplanted by the GPS signals.
For those who need accurate wall clocks there are clocks available which synchronize with signals from WWV but these only update periodically and can also drift between updates.
For those interested, there is a great book titled “Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps” which gives the history of using time for navigation, mapping, train schedules, etc. and which clearly explains the meaning and difficulty of synchronized time. It turns out that this is not as simple as it seems.
Neil