Anybody want to make recordings of CHU

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Phil Karn

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May 24, 2026, 8:27:12 PM (6 days ago) May 24
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Is anybody within groundwave range of CHU willing to make some recordings while we still can? As some of you know I've written a WWV/WWVH emulator. I've also written a CHU emulator, but except for the half-hourly station IDs on WWV and WWVH they all use a local speech synthesizer for the voice announcements.

I haven't found a good male French Canadian voice for it. I'm also not totally sure of the exact pattern for the long French versions on the odd minutes. It's usually "C H U Canada, temps universel coordonné ... " but I've also heard "...U T C" (spelled out).

I've wanted to use actual on-air recordings, but haven't gotten a chance to make really clean ones. If someone near Ottawa could capture a whole day of CHU using a GPS controlled receiver, it would be really easy for me to chop it up into segments to play at the proper times. Or at least one hour.

Phil


Marcus D. Leech

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May 24, 2026, 9:56:45 PM (6 days ago) May 24
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I'm within ground-wave distance, theoretically, but I've never had much success receiving it here.  I'm about 85km away from the transmitter site.


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Dana Whitlow

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May 25, 2026, 6:54:33 AM (6 days ago) May 25
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Phil, why would you care about the source of the voice
announcements as long as they are intelligible?  What
counts are the timing of the ticks and beeps, the phase
stability of the carrier and sidebands, etc.

In  the weeks preceding the total solar eclipse of April
2024, I spent a lot of time evaluating various signals
from time sources distant from me along the eclipse
path, CHU being among them.  Note that my home
is located in Kerrville, TX, within  just a few miles of
the center of the totality band.  

I found that CHU was really unusable for me.  Their
signal was extremely unstable in essentially all respects.
Between that and similar observations made on the
various WWV HF signals, I have concluded that HF
time signals received by skip modes are virtually
useless for anything much beyond setting one's watch.

For the aforementioned eclipse, I ended up using the
signal from NAA (Cutler, Maine), having built a 2m-
square loop for the purpose.  This was my first VLF
experience ever, and it worked out pretty well.

Dana 
(K8YUM, in limbo)


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Phil Erickson

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May 25, 2026, 7:47:07 AM (5 days ago) May 25
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Hi Dana,
  
  I have to push back very strongly on your assertion that HF time signals are 'useless for anything'.  The whole point of the Grape project, and the Personal Space Weather Station, and other efforts here on the HamSCI collective are to measure the varying properties of the time signal as received and then derive ionospheric information from them through inverse methods, ray tracing, tomography, and other tools.  The combination of a time standards-locked broadcast at one end and a receiver at the other end is a 'meta instrument' that is synthesized in software, and provides interesting, directly relevant information that is sampled quite differently from most professional ionospheric remote sensors.  

  People new to this list should not read this thread and think that WWV, WWVH, WWVB, and CHU are useless.  Completely the opposite.  Their apparent 'instability' contains multitudes.

73
Phil W1PJE


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Dana Whitlow

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May 25, 2026, 11:13:49 AM (5 days ago) May 25
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Phil, I think you partly misunderstand.  What I was
mainly questioning was the importance of genesis of
the voice announcements themselves.

My story about the timing instability of the received
HF time signals was meant to reflect the uselessness
of said signals for critical timing purposes, but I meant
no criticism of using said instabilities for studying the
variability of ionospheric propagation itself.  

You may recall that I recently spent 10 years at the
Arecibo Observatory, one of whose main purposes
was just that kind of study.

Dana


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Phil Erickson

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May 25, 2026, 11:47:36 AM (5 days ago) May 25
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Hi Dana,

  Thanks for the correction - since this list is archived, now we have the right picture for those in the future who might read the original messages and get the wrong idea.

73
Phil

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Phil Karn

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May 25, 2026, 2:29:10 PM (5 days ago) May 25
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It's mostly just nostalgia for a signal I grew up with in MD in the early 1970s, where CHU was usually stronger than WWV.

--Phil

Phil Karn

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May 25, 2026, 2:39:28 PM (5 days ago) May 25
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Yes, today if you want precise, stable but inexpensive time and frequency you get a GPSDO. But that hardly makes standard time stations like WWV, WWVH and CHU useless. It's precisely what makes them (in combination with GPS) so useful for ionospheric research.

They are also invaluable during the ARRL Frequency Measuring Tests as ionospheric calibration probes. On my first try in April 2026 I came in second place by using primarily CHU on 7850 and then 3330 as proxies for the ionospheric paths from Ohio and Oklahoma to my receivers in California, and I definitely would have done worse without it. My observed ionospheric offsets were about -0.2 to -0.22 Hz, much greater than my actual RMS error of 6.72 ppb.

I suspect we'll see some worse numbers this coming November. Unless somebody in the eastern US/Canada wants to put up some good ultra-stable reference signals during the test...

Phil

On 5/25/26 06:53, Dana Whitlow wrote:

Kristina Collins

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May 25, 2026, 2:44:04 PM (5 days ago) May 25
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I know David AD8Y has mentioned that he's planning some recordings from Cleveland between now and 6/22. He is out of town this week, though.
-KC

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Christopher Stubbs

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May 25, 2026, 2:48:04 PM (5 days ago) May 25
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Our team recently used WWV and CHU broadcasts to monitor the phase coherence time of the propagation paths. See appended submission to the recent IES2026 workshop. Having multiple phase-stable emitters with different relationships between the geomagnetic field and the propagation path is very useful to monitor the differences in the O and X modes of propagation. 

Cordially, 
Chris
 

Christopher Stubbs
Professor of Physics and of Astronomy
stu...@g.harvard.edu



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IES2026_propagation (2).pdf

googl...@cox.net

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May 26, 2026, 2:04:31 PM (4 days ago) May 26
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Chris,

 

Nice paper! I wish I could afford three of the DX Engineering loop antennas… (wink).

 

73,

 

Mark Braunstein  WA4KFZ

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