It lives!

[Terry S]

After sitting dormant for more than a year, I decided to take a 3rd look at my Jeff Thomas WWVB clock, the one that uses the huge Z568M tubes. At some point the WWVB clock module fell off a window ledge and would never lock onto the radio station after that.

I had dug into it earlier and never found a fault -- it just wouldn't lock. But recently I bought a decent magnifier for my workbench, and today I took it apart again. Still didn't find a definitive cause for the failure, but under magnification, I went thru the board and re-soldered all my connections as well as some of the factory solder joints. I wasn't at all confident that I'd made any improvements.

Put it all back together and within an hour, the clock had locked onto WWVB and is working perfectly. I must've touched the right solder joint!

[gregebert]

Nice!  How far away from Denver are you located ? I wonder if the signal strength is an issue. And if you're a time zealot, being 2000 miles away means your time will be about 10msec late due to propagation delays. Doggone it, radio signals and fiberoptics are so annoyingly slow....

[Nicholas Stock]

Very nice Terry! I should get my one out of its slumber too....IIRC it needs a colon resoldering...

Jeff made some nice timepieces....

Nick

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[Terry S]

Greg, I'm in western Wisconsin, so not terribly far. I'm probably only seeing a 5 msec delay, I can live with that.

[Terry S]

He did indeed, Nick. I feel fortunate to own a couple of them.

Unfortunately the WWVB clock movement he used on this device has become unobtanium. I have one stashed away, bought at a local thrift store..... if the need arises.

[Nicholas Stock]

Klockit still sell Quartex atomic modules, do these not work? I had planned on buying a spare at some point....

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[Terry S]

It's an entirely different movement. To work with Jeff's code and hardware, you must find the old movement with a large red button. There are old movements with a blue button; best I can tell, (disclaimer: I have not taken one apart) these will not work either. They use a different push button sequence to sync the hands to the current time.

[Nicholas Stock]

Hmm... my receiver is stripped out of the original and in its own plastic box, rewired and no need for a red button press etc, just locks on after a while....I remember Jeff fixing it for me.... I'll have to dig it out, been a while.

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[Terry S]

Yes that's correct. There's a PIC on the clock board that drives the pushbutton input. The clock board gets some fairly simple modifications:

http://www.nixie.dk/~jthomas/wwvbmod.html

http://www.nixie.dk/~jthomas/wwvb.html

[Terry S]

Rather the WWVB receiver board gets modifications.

[Nicholas Stock]

Thanks Terry, what a trip down memory lane.... I will keep an eye out for an old movement!

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[GDR GDR]

the eldest sibling of the WWVB family says hello! :) running non-stop 22+ years - and on the original tubes as well! cheers...