On Mon, 8 Jun 2009 22:52:33 +0100, "MatSav" matthew | dot | savage |
at | dsl | dot | pipex | dot | com wrote:


"John Rowland" wrote in
message ...
MatSav wrote:
"John Rowland" wrote
in
message ...

the NPL which was, and is, in Teddington.

Indeed it is - I work there!

Ah! I have an idea for how the NPL could use the spare bits in
the MSF signal to improve the service... Do you think they
might be up for that, or are they a Not-Invented-Here
organisation? (I guess the answer to that should be emailed
rather than, er, broadcast.)

With apologies for having missed your suggestion - NPL are a
Government-Owned, Company-Operated business - so I suspect they'd
welcome an opportunity to increase their profit. However, there
are constraints on what can be broadcast in particulat parts of
the spectrum - and I think the MSF frequency is prescribed by
statute, so it can't carry anything else. But I could be wrong,
of course. Try e-mailing them directly - contact details
available from their web site, http://www.npl.co.uk/time

the coding is described in :-
http://www.npl.co.uk/upload/pdf/MSF_Time_Date_Code.pdf

If I'm reading various bits of info correctly the standard used by MSF
(UK) and DCF (DE) is an AFNOR (Association Française de
Normalisation)/ISO standard derived from an IRIG (Inter-Range
Instrumentation Group (USA) ) standard originally used for rocket
range testing purposes. It looks like there might now also be some ITU
involvement :-
http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-r/oth...040001MSWE.doc

The MSF frequency IMU will be set by international agreement along
with other radio frequency allocations.