Mills@UDEL.EDU (12/29/87)
Folks, On or about 1550Z this day the 100-Hz WWV subcarrier was readjusted to its original (nonstandard) configuration in use for the last several years. As of twenty minutes after that all the WWV clocks I can reach out and tock to via the Internet once again were ticking to WWV chimes. I warmly thanked John Melton, Engineer in Charge at WWV, on behalf of all Heath clock owners. I have not heard from Precision Standard Time clockers on how their ticks were tocking. I have updated and am now in procwss of distributing new code to all the fuzzball time servers that should properly handle the leap second promised at the end of this year. I will attempt to read as many clocks as I can during that second and report. I should mention that I did in fact inquire of the local power utility who pays for the extra second of steam and how the utilities coordinate nominal mains-frequency time before and after the event, since neither of these appears in the tariff. The answer to the first question is the ratepayer pays for the steam and the utility pays for the depreciation. The answer to the second is in a lovely graph taken during the last leap which I can make available in a Sun-format image file. Well, you guys probably think I'm nuts over the network-time issue, but in a quirky kind of way it's a lot of fun. Dave