A WWV Clock Comparator (90s - 2000s era)

[ledtester]

Found this at my local surplus store. The instructions are very elaborate!

[ChristofferB]

Very interesting! I bet somebody was cursing themselves for forgetting the size of the vernier dial when laying out the front panel text 

Strange to see banana plugs on a fairly high accuracy instrument -  even stranger to see copper hooks pushed into them!

Maybe it could find use as a general purpose differential frequency counter?

[TheMG]

Those aren't banana plug sockets, they are much smaller and designed to accomodate either a standard multimeter probe tip or purpose made pin connectors. I see them a lot on older equipment for externally accessible test points for DC or low frequency signals.

Quite common to see people shove pieces of 14awg solid copper into them so they can clip a scope probe onto it.  You can get special pin adapters but not easy to find, not sure if they even still make such a thing.

[floobydust]

It refers to a book "Accurate Clock Pendulums" chapter "Check your Clock Against WWV", by Robert J. Matthys. It seems to be for pendulum clock testing? TAKE IT APART

A time-nut might like it. "... The Shortt clock, made in the 1920's is the most famous accurate clock pendulum ever known, having an accuracy of one second per year when kept at nearly constant temperature. Almost all of a pendulum clock's accuracy resides in its pendulum. If the pendulum is accurate, the clock will be accurate. In this book, the author describes many scientific aspects of pendulum design and operation in simple terms with experimental data, and little mathematics...

Robert J. Matthys was a Senior Research Engineer at Honeywell, Inc., from 1952 to 1987. He has spent thirty-seven years designing a wide variety of hardware and instrumentation in the fields of electronics, optics, acoustics, mechanics, and photography. In addition, he has spent nine years designing and testing pendulums of various kinds, along with their electronic drive systems and servos, both pulsed and continuous sine wave."

[0culus]

The manual for the Tektronix 184 time-mark generator explicitly instructs you to set the crystal oven using WWV if you don't have a laboratory frequency reference available. The recommended method is to tune your HF receiver to WWV, connect a short wire to the center conductor of the output BNC, and twiddle the frequency adjust till you don't hear beating.

[N2IXK]

Given the lousy audio response (particularly bass) of typical HF receivers, I would suggest looking at the detector stage output with a scope so you could get closer to a true zero beat than you could by simply listening to the audio.