For a look at the bad old days, before coordination, see the plot of WWV w.r.t. UT2 in figure 1 of http://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/1681.pdf Yes, that's 29 leaps in a span of 3 years.
Note that the plotted frequency deviation is w.r.t. one value of the US Frequency Standard, and other publications detail the changes which were made to that frequency, so that is not necessarily close to the present frequency of TAI. For accumulating intervals, leap seconds are much easier. Also, the only conceivable "correct" time scale for the broadcasts is UT2, a belief which was amplified by the CCIR with its Rec. 374 in 1963 and 374-1 in 1966. As such, the notion of leap seconds was so far away from the existing CCIR Rec that they did not update 374 to specify them. Instead they created a whole new Recommendation 460. That original recommendation makes it clear that as early as 1970 the CCIR recognized the relevance of the difference between atomic time and universal time, and they specified that the broadcasts should follow universal time. -- Steve Allen <[email protected]> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
