Wednesday afternoon is forum change day

Hi,

Being heavily involved in global communications, I can tell you without reservation that Everyone so involved calls it UTC and No One so involved calls it UT without the C.

Go take a one minute listen to WWV on 2.5, 5, 10, 15 or 25 MHz. Universal Coordinated Time. Not Universal Time.

And, yes, the C is in the middle for English speakers. The C goes on the end for French, which are the ones who began calling it that rather than GMT. And we all write it UTC.

Stan

It's looking good Alan, thanks.

@AlainCh2

Il layout della home page è stato notevolmente ridotto.

I wasn't worried about how it came out because I can always find my way around. I did think that photography categories should always come before the gear though. Excellent work there Alan and yes, I do like the layout!

Pat yourself on the back because I can't reach 😉

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? 🤣🤣🤣

Alan,

Thanks for your sterling work. It looks much better than before. Of course, you will get some moans but I think the following summarises the important point:

The curators of the long running "critique & discussion" threads - eg Sunday Cat! - all of which I enjoy - need to consider carefully where they think they should reside. But as Minniev says "...threads view remains our best friend..."

Tim

seriously what has changed ?

Sorry Stan.

I was in Transmission myself.

there is a bad understanding of the difference between UTC <the official English name of Coordinated Universal Time> and UT.

The first is machine related to a value "time transmissions standard" ...as a better way than "Stepped Atomic Time (SAT)",
which doesn't allow time adjustment for Earth's rotation speed decreasing unsteadily.

The second is a standard Time reference for humans, to use on Planets and Space, it's based on Earth's geography.

Standard signals should contain information on the difference between UTC and UT.
( if you mind reading some: www.bipm.org/documents/20126/28435864/working-document-ID-3644/2a6ce17c-7b50-4164-9bee-64f77bfad895/)

this is Wiki that helps my failing memory:

The current version of UTC is defined by International Telecommunication Union Recommendation (ITU-R TF.460-6), Standard-frequency and time-signal emissions, and is based on International Atomic Time (TAI) with leap seconds added at irregular intervals to compensate for the accumulated difference between TAI and time measured by Earth's rotation.
Leap seconds are inserted as necessary to keep UTC within 0.9 seconds of the UT1 variant of universal time.
See the "Current number of leap seconds" section for the number of leap seconds inserted to date."

----> Being this completely OT that's my last post on the argument

Thank you, Alan, I think that helps. As a former web content manager I'm very aware that no site organisation will please everyone; in effect every individual organises things in their own idiosyncratic way, but this is a decent effort. Makes the home page less intimidating and I like that it emphasises photography more than gear.

Of course, as most photography site managers will know, gear draws 10x more traffic than actual photography, but that's just the way it is.

This might be true (has anyone called this "gear-pressure" yet? 😅), but let's a least try to demonstrate that there are other functional ways of building an interesting and functional site up! 👍

Thanks a lot @AlanSh - the new layout looks great!

Thanks for all the work, it's looking much better!
Couple o things:
- I thought the mf43 forum would go as the potential users preferred going to brand forums?
- I can no longer see the beta testers forum, a matter of permissions or has it been abandoned?
- it's a choice but we now have a very popular 'image discussions' forum within the 'news' category and also a category 'photographic genres'. Seems a bit lopsided and seeing also the discussion about the 'weeklies' something for future consideration

Hi,

I agree. It's time to end. Time. Get it?

We were talking about the terminology of GMT v UTC. And how this is what the time signal station announcers call it. And then you want to shift it into the encoded signal practically no one uses any longer.

It's unused enough to where NIST is contemplating shutting down WWV and WWVH. It's greatly outlived it's usefulness. Replaced by the GPS constellation and the time and frequency reference receivers I worked on with Hewlett Packard when I was with Ericsson. What we needed for the CDMA radio base stations.

That worked out so well that we talked the FCC into allowing us to switch from our own Cesium.Beam Standards (commonly referred to as an Atomic Clock) for the GPS derived reference in our factory. I still have one, plus a Rubidium standard, but they sit there unused for some time now.

Not to worry, as NIST still runs a bank of them and then compare that to the hydrogen maser. And the US Naval Observatory sends that reference to the birds to keep their Cesium Beam or Rubidium standards on track.

Oh, and no Leap Seconds here.They operate on where we were back at the beginning of GPS. It's up to the end user to factor that in. So now we have yet another time standard: GPS Time. And that's what the cellular systems all over use to show us the time on our phones. Which are all UTC time zones plus or minus depending on where one is standing. Some applications still call it GMT rather than UTC. And we are back to the beginning. What humans call it. ;)

Anyway, I'm less interested in the time my GPS Disciplined Oscillators spits out the serial port than I am with the 10 MHz reference from the double ovenized SC Cut crystal oscillator. That's what keep all my equipment operating properly even if the GPS goes offline for a bit. And that's another form of time. And 0.9 seconds here is very, very sloppy. I get +/- 1 Hz at 100 GHz. But then, to be fair, 0.9 seconds is pretty good for slow old humans. ;)

So, enjoy your time, whatever you want to call it. I'm going QRT.

Stan