Oops, I meant to say "wish to abolish leap seconds" in the third
paragraph, rather than "which to abolish leap seconds."
James Maynard wrote:
> It seems clear that we have two camps, or schools of thought, on this
> mailing list:
>
> 1) Those who favour retaining the status quo ante, in which civil time
> is based on UTC and the standard time and frequency stations broadcast
> UTC; and
>
> 2) Those who find it difficult to cope with UTC's leap seconds mechanism
> and which to abolish leap seconds. These people propose abolishing leap
> seconds, thereby causing the offset from UTC (or its renamed
> replacement, TI) to be constant.
>
> I belong to the former camp. I want UTC, leap seconds and all, to
> continue to be broadcast on the standard time and frequency stations,
> and to continue to be used as the reference from which the various civil
> time zones are offset.
>
> I wonder, though, whether those in the other camp would find it
> acceptable to have the standard time and frequency stations not only
> broadcast UTC and DUT1 (= UT1 - UTC, to 0.1 s resolution), but also to
> broadcast DTAI (= TAI - UTC, 1 s resolution)?
>
> DTAI changes infrequently, so it could be broadcast at a rather low data
> rate. Currently all the various one-bit-per-second digital time codes
> from the various standard time and frequency stations have at least one
> or two unassigned (reserved) bits. So one way to broadcast DTAI would to
> be to change that bit or bits once per minute, to broadcast DTAI at a
> one-bit-per-minute rate.
>
> This would provide a backward-compatible way to accommodate all users.
>
> --
> James Maynard
> Salem, Oregon, USA
>
> .
>
--
James Maynard
Salem, Oregon, USA
Received on Tue Jan 24 2006 - 09:12:08 PST