Use of TAI is fine, as long as you won't tell anyone near the timelords, as obvious TAI is supposed to be "hands off".
Magnus, Mike,
The issue, I suspect, is that "TAI" still, mostly, in print and in people's minds, refers to the abstract paper clock, maintained by the BIPM, rather than some physical realization. For physical realizations we have all the UTC(k) clocks, one or sometimes more than one per country. The "UTC" you get from GPS is a slightly noisy version of UTC(USNO) which itself is a slightly noisy version of UTC. Depending on your technical or legal needs you can apply corrections to shift your native GPS tick to better match the UTC(k) of your choice. For example, I know NIST uses a GPS CV setup in such a way so that the tick becomes a UTC(NIST) tick rather than a UTC(USNO) tick. All this sort of phase manipulation occurs with flavors of UTC and we're all used to it. So it's convenient when we talk about "TAI" that it's just the paper clock we're talking about. On the other hand, when nanoseconds and issues of virtual or physical clocks don't matter, you can add 34 seconds to a wrist watch can call it TAI if you want. It's what I do here: http://www.leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm /tvb _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.