Template talk:Time signal stations

I shall add pages for OLB5 and Y3S former stations and for HD2IOA (Equador Navy) soon. Sv1xv (talk) 15:21, 13 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've started a test cases page to illustrate the difference in layout between the old and new versions. There's no real reason to use a column layout here; the standard navbox layout works fine. I reckon the sandbox version should be deployed. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 03:03, 25 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I see that WWV and WWVB are identified by the US flag, but WWVH is identified by the Hawaiian flag. If there is a reason why WWVH should use the Hawaiian flag instead of the US flag, then why doesn't it apply to using the flag of Colorado to identify WWV and WWVB?

Not to cause a ruckus, but I am curious about the apparent inconsistency. ■ NeoAmsterdam^Talk_Edits2010-04-22T04:53:28Z —Preceding undated comment added 04:53, 22 April 2010 (UTC).

Because the North American Shortwave Association lists Hawaii separate from the Continental United States on its country list. --  Denelson83  01:02, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Re: Template_talk:Satellite_navigation_systems#Width

Given the conflict with the standard navboxes on most pages where they are used, really these templates should use default width. ChiZeroOne (talk) 08:31, 25 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Is there also a time signal station in China, working on 77.5 kHz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrB1MQrDu9k )? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.228.18.162 (talk) 06:00, 7 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the heads-up, and I hope for more, but until there's an article about it, or at least a lot more information, there's not much to do. 71.41.210.146 (talk) 13:34, 26 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Since User:Matthiaspaul added it, I removed it, and he (I'm assuming, based on the name) re-added it, it's time for a discussion...

My objection is that a whole category ("Ultrashortwave") for one frankly-bad (100 ms accuracy) time service is giving it unwarranted prominence. It's a whole category, far worse than everything else listed, and not a station. Put together, my take on those three factors is "doesn't belong here". (It's also not a dedicated time service, but that's a lesser factor in my view.)

While GPS and GLONASS aren't single transmitters, they are centrally administered and arguably a single "station" with multiple transmitters, not unlike many commercial radio and TV stations, or JJY. (Even WWVB has two transmitters, although very close.)

What I would support, OTOH, is a category of non-dedicated/secondary/piggybacked (wording TBD) radio time services. RDS-CT, Extended Data Services (time code described in this NIST document p.13), time-from-CDMA receivers (EndRun and CellSync), the optional time code in Digital Radio Mondiale (the spec, page 63: 6.4.3.9 Time and date information data entity - type 8), Marine AIS, etc.

(Arguably, TDF belongs in this category, but I'm inclined to leave it alone, since the time signal is much more strongly separated from the underlying transmission than these other systems.) 71.41.210.146 (talk) 13:28, 26 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! I see your point but I think the purpose of navigation boxes is to help find related information. It should be up to the reader to decide if the quality is good enough or nor. Perhaps with the exception of "really obscure stuff"(tm), existance should be enough to include it in a navbox.

RDS CT is a service not bound to a single station, although a user will most probably use a single station to receive it at a given time. GPS/GLONASS etc. are not bound to a single station either, these are services using multiple transmitters at the same time. Both are - in different ways - quite different from the other stationary time signal services.

Thinking about it, rows like "xyz wave", "satellite" and "defunct" discuss completely different qualities. So, perhaps we could solve the problem by renaming the template from "stations" to "services" and regroup the information into "stationary" (sub-divided into "xyz wave"), "satellite", ... or "primary", "secondary", ... (TBD)? "Defunct" should not be a separate group at all, but be indicated by an attribute (coded by color, italics, underline etc.) "Dedicated" could be another attribute. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 15:07, 26 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I agree about the purpose of a navbox, but you have to have a boundary around "related". or the desired information gets lost among the clutter. There's no simple rule; you just have to look for a good sized gap or jump in relevance which is also at a suitable distance. If the rules were simply "time dissemination" and "radio broadcast", I'd also have to mention top-of-the-hour station identification.

And, as you say, the existence of articles is also a factor. Are we listing time signals, or wikipedia articles? Really, it's both, and again there's no simple rule; you're trying to find a defensible threshold of notability, where the existence of an article is a major factor, but not the only one.

My complaint is particularly that you're including one time signal that's significantly different from the existing collection, but not following a new consistent inclusion rule. I'd be much happier with a new row with several entries unless you can argue that a particular time code is really unique (e.g. optical frequencies).

I didn't create the current rows, but they actually make sense to me: they basically describe the reception characteristics. Satellite services have weak sources, and they're moving, so you need a view of a good chunk of sky area, but they work worldwide. Longwave penetrate buildings well. Defunct can't be received at all. "Piggybacked time signal" works well in this, because you have to be able to receive the "main" signal to get a time code.

Of course, another point for the current rows is that they are reasonably evenly balanced. That's an editorial/wikipedia factor more than a technical one, but also important to making a navbox useful to a reader for navigation. A bunch of single-item categories and everything else lumped together isn't useful.

You're right that defunct can be considered a different dimension rather than a navbox row, but it's nice that it produces a reasonable sized group, and I think it ends up being comprehensible and useful to the reader, even if not perfectly consistent (Besides, I just got through an argument about my use of struckout entries on a navbox and the votes went to "better to not list it at all than such ugly typography.")

Basically, don't get hung up on the wavelength; what we're going is finding a useful grouping and then finding a name for each group. (If I wanted to be pedantic, I could argue that HBG doesn't belong in longwave or shortwave because it doesn't have a wavelength. We're listing current transmission characteristics, not historical ones like KK2XEI.)

"GPS/GLONASS etc. are not bound to a single station either, these are services using multiple transmitters at the same time. Both are - in different ways - quite different from the other stationary time signal services." Yes, which is exactly why they're in a separate category. And they're together in that category because they're much more like each other than they are like other categories. They all use multiple satellites to get continuous coverage, they all have one controlling organization, etc.

Piggyback protocols are prone to suffering from unnoticed errors and outages, because they're very much a minor "convenience" feature dependent on the individual station to get right And it can be hard to find who's responsible for fixing it if it's wrong. With the exception of CDMA, which is actually used for precise timing, they also tend to have crappy accuracy. I see a distinct category there; the challenge is to find a short descriptive label.

71.41.210.146 (talk) 22:34, 26 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. trying to think about a good name of similar length to the current ones, "Multi-source" might not be a bad category name. I'm going through a lot of words: secondary, piggyback, convenience, low-precision, auxiliary, common, protocol, standardized, But the fact that there are multiple independent generators of the same code is perhaps the most significant characteristic of the group, and one that includes high-precision CDMA. 71.41.210.146 (talk) 23:42, 26 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]