Atomic clock devices are expensive peices of equipment mainly confined to national laboratories. However, there are a number of atomic clock references available free to air for computer time synchronisation.
The DCF atomic clock radio signal is broadcast from Frankfurt in Germany. The time signal is broadcast at 77.5 kHz. Coverage is most of central and north-western Europe.
The radio signal is broadcast as a sequence of 60 pulses, one pulse per second, each pulse constitutes a data bit. A mintes worth of data bits encode the time and date information. The data string is terminated on the minute boundary by a marker to signify the start of a minute.
Galleon Systems NTP Servers and Radio based time servers have DCF reception options.
|