Playing With Atomic Clocks At Home

Wired is running a profile of the Time Nuts, a small group of people who buy surplus precision time equipment — cesium clocks for example — on eBay and keep really accurate time, because they can. The article quotes Tom Van Baak, who has outfitted a time lab superior to those of many small countries: "If you have one clock... you are peaceful and have no worries. If you have two clocks... you start asking, 'What time is it, really?'"

Re:Clearly....

[Anonymous Coward]

> Besides, the only time that *really* matters down to the minute
> is when you're trying to record a TV show

Just because you have limited imagination..

For example, when correlating long-baseline interferometer data
from amateur radio astronomers there is ABSOLUTELY a requirement
to have sub-millisecond accuracy.

And that's just one example from recent experience.

How to set?

[russotto]

OK, as much fun as it would be to have my own stratum-1 NTP server, how do you (read: some ordinary joe, not a university researcher) synchronize these things to TAI in the first place?

'Time is an illusion...

[jackpot777]

...lunch-time doubly so.'

Ford Prefect. Which is very apt, because today is Mos Def's birthday.