Keep your eye on the clock, especially if you've been recording your QSOs like the rest of us, in Coordinated Universal Time. A new atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology has been operating since April at NIST's Boulder, Colorado offices. It will soon have a bigger job as part of a group of timekeepers around the world that assists with the calibration of UTC. Known as NIST-F4, the clock is still awaiting certification by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures before that can happen.
Until then, its unprecedented precision is already hard at work defining the official time here in the United States.
Its creators call it a "fountain" of precision because the cloud of cesium atoms inside the clock oscillate at a rate of more than 9 billion times per second, rising and falling in the same way water does in a fountain. Its resonant frequency is 9 billion, 192 million, 631 thousand 770 hertz - to be precise. That is the frequency that sets the standards for all other clocks.
If you want to see just how NIST-F4 works, see the link to a YouTube video in the text version of this week's newscast at arnewsline.org
Watching it will take only three minutes and three seconds of your time - more or less.