This is hopefully going to end up as a class project and therefore the
goal
of learning how to build your own antenna and receiver is the reason I'm
not
intending to just go and use someone's "all in one" WWVB receiver IC
(even
though colleges seem to push that approach these days... but then
_someone_
had to design that IC, right!?).

Hans Summers has a nice section on his website in the UK that has
full particulars of his 1991 first-year university project of a 60 KHz
receiver-decoder for the Rugby station there. He used discrete TTL
packages for the entire decoder! [Rugby modulation code a bit
different compared to WWVB]

http://www.hanssummers.com/electroni...o/radioclk.htm

Hans (who appears in here from time to time) has _everything_ on
that project available there. Interesting!

If I type the link incorrect, just get www.hanssummers.com and
navigate from there. Interesting website with lots of different
projects
well-described.

Thanks Len. I always read in here but rarely find the time to post anything
much.

My 60KHz receiver was just a Tuned Radio Frequency (TRF) design and very
poor, indicating the state of my knowledge of receiver architectures at the
time. If I were doing something similar today I'd do it very differently.
I'd probably use a crystal oscillator divided down to something near 60KHz
and heterodyne that down to audio frequencies for further filtering to get
the 1 pulse per second, with coded length. I'd probably still make the
decoder in TTL though ;-)

The MSF Rugby transmissions are a 60KHz carrier interrupted each second for
either 100mS representing binary 0, or 200mS representing binary 1. Details
at http://www.npl.co.uk/time/msf.html.

Rugby is a town as near to what one might consider to be the centre of
England as could be judged. By coincidence I happened to drive past the
antenna farm on Saturday on my way up the motorway. I'd previously seen the
antennas from a great distance but up close: very impressive. There are 12
huge masts. I think there are 12, but you don't want to spend too much time
looking at the antennas and not the road, or you'll join the wrecks of all
the other unfortunate radio amateurs strewn along the motorway embankment.
Who no doubt departed this mortal coil happily dreaming of how many
wavelengths above ground they could put their HF antennas ;-) As you get
closer, a whole forest of smaller masts becomes visible.

There's a picture here
http://www.subbrit.org.uk/sb-sites/s...io/index.shtml.
Actually, reading that now shows there are indeed 12 masts, 820ft high each
one, so my count was correct. I read somewhere else that there is a plan to
close the Rugby site, a pity.

73 Hans
http://www.HansSummers.com