[LEAPSECS] Celebrating the new year a few seconds late

[Richard Clark]

To: Leap Second Discussion List <leapsecs at leapsecond.com>
Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] Celebrating the new year a few seconds late

Here in the USA a good opportunity to see/hear this comes up each year
during the State of the Union address and also with the debates in
election years. At least 4 of the 5 traditional over the air netowrks as
well as numerous cable channels will carry these. Also a number of radio
stations will have them.

I've done impromptu surveys a couple of times. Here are my unscientific
and only vaguely remembered results.

In 2000 I was lived in the Washington DC area and had analog cable
service. The total span of delays was 8 seconds. The earliest was local
NPR radio station WAMU. Cable TV station C-Span was only a fraction of a
second behind. Most channels were in a cluster 2-4 seconds behind. There
was a single outlier lagging by 8 seconds. Don't recall who it was.

Again 2 years ago (2016) on a couple of occasions I found myself in need
of relief from the program content and started twiddling the dials. I was
then living in Tucson Arizona. My 'cable' was satellite provider Direct
TV. Again, local NPR radio stations were the earliest sources. It was be a
toss up from one event to the next whether local station KUAZ or the
translator for Phoenix station KJZZ would be earliest, the separation
being only a fraction of a second. As in 2000 C-Span was the earliest of
the tv stations, with a delay of just a second or two. The pack wasn't as
tightly clustered as in 2000, which makes sense in light of Brooks'
comments elsewhere in this thread. The total spread that I found was about
16 seconds on all 3(?) of the events that I surveyed although the ordering
of the various stations within the pack differed from one event to the next.
I don't have any way of knowing how much delay there was in KUAZ or KJZZ
that I was using as the reference.

With this lack of synchronization I have now encountered one channel
which regularly and reproducibly has its programs slightly clipped
by the dvr. This may start being noticed by the less observant masses
at some point.

Of course it could also just be sloppiness on the part of the station
programming and scheduling people.

Many years ago I recall hearing that the BBC used to advance their time
signals on some shortwave services by ~200 ms to correct for the known
deleys of the signals sent by their various transmitters.

Ah, the good old days.
Maybe we could try letting channels know about these propagation delays.
How many of them would recognize a QSL report:-)

Richard

On Tue, 1 Jan 2019, Philip Newton wrote:

> On Tue, 1 Jan 2019 at 15:33, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> >
> > A lot of Americans synchronize their new year celebrations to the
> > drop of the ball in Times Square as seen on TV, which means they
> > celebrate a few seconds late because digital TV has an inherent delay
> > to it (for signal encoding or something... I really don't know the
> > technical details).
>
> You used to hear that during major sports events as well -- there'd be
> cheers coming up from various houses, then an echoing cheer a little
> bit later when those who had digital rather than analogue TV saw the
> goal.
> _______________________________________________
> LEAPSECS mailing list
> LEAPSECS at leapsecond.com
> https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
>