NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2018 Aug 18, 19:00 -0700
Roger Sinnott, you wrote:
"American troops during the Vietnam War learned what life was like without carefully regulated 60-Hz current. Most (if not all) bases had large diesel generators for electricity, and their output frequency was only roughly 60 Hz. A clock set one day could be 10 minutes off the next morning. In fact, the famous “Gooood Moooorrrrrning Vietnam!” on the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) provided a time signal of sorts, telling troops to when to get up or risk missing breakfast or a duty muster. They could leave a radio on all night (when the AFRS was off the air), to be awakened at precisely 6 a.m. by the iconic sign-on."
Interesting! Now that is a radio time signal.
It's a bit ironic that sources in the US have suddenly realized that we're about to abandon frequency regulation for time-keeping, considering that as little as five or six months ago US media were enjoying a little schadenfreude at the expense of the Europeans and their "Balkan conflicts" (that's how it seemed in some of the coverage). More here:
reuters: serbia-kosovo-power-grid-row-delays-european-clocks.
I visited Kosovo thirty years ago. On a backpacking-summer, crossing Europe in my early twenties, I made a point of visiting as many of the component republics and provinces of Yugoslavia as I could. It was partly just "stamp-collecting", but, sadly, I also had the distinct feeling back then that they had more history on the way in their collective future. And there's more coming. Watch as Russia tears up Bosnia as cover for its own machinations in Ukraine and Georgia... More history coming...
Frank Reed
