NavList:

Folks, no more "me, too" messages on this topic please. For email recipients of messages, this creates a bunch of nearly identical, content-free messages coming from the same source. We've already been tagged tonight as a spam-sender. Not good. Of course the topic is worth some discussion so feel free to include your 'signed it' message in the context of a longer message. Here are some things that come to mind:

• How many signatures does it take to have an impact in circumstances like this? Given that there are maybe 50-100 NavList followers who are interested enough to be pro-active on an issue like this on a good day, how can we get the much larger numbers that are undoubtedly needed? I'm assuming that anything less than ten thousand is equivalent to zero.
• Is NIST making a serious threat, or is this just an easy budget negotiation trick? I suspect that there are plenty of folks in Washington who would be loath to shut down a service with such a long-standing legacy. But it's probably expensive, and I bet it's mostly hated at NIST. So they hold a knife to the throat of WWV until they get guaranteed funding for more interesting projects.
• While I agree with Paul Hirose's comment that WWV is a nice "gold standard" for time, isn't it obsolete? Who listens to WWV? How many people does it serve? And even among technical users, who needs it but cannot get better time from a GPS-based source? If every single person who has intentionally tuned in to WWV (audio) in the last six months signed up, would we reach 10,000 signatures??
• Regarding those nifty clocks that sync up via WWVB, how are these anything more than "science toys"? Don't get me wrong: toys are good for the soul, but the point is that they are non-essential. And can't those toys, too, be replaced with devices with some simple GPS receiver? (I don't know --I'm just asking).

Frank Reed