WWV: The Station That Broadcasts Time Itself

A few miles north of Fort Collins, on a stretch of flat Colorado plain that most drivers pass without a glance, stands one of the most quietly essential radio installations in American history. This is WWV, the National Institute of Standards and Technology's time and frequency broadcast station, ticking away without interruption longer than almost any other broadcaster in the world.

The call letters WWV were assigned in October of nineteen nineteen to what was then the National Bureau of Standards. Early broadcasts went out from Washington, D.C., carrying time signals that let ships at sea, scientists in laboratories, and radio operators in the field synchronize their clocks to a common standard. For decades the station moved through several East Coast locations before landing here in northern Colorado. On December first, nineteen sixty-six, the transmitters at Fort Collins went live and the old East Coast signal went dark.

What WWV broadcasts is deceptively simple: a tick, once per second, on multiple shortwave frequencies, including two and a half, five, ten, and fifteen megahertz, along with a voice announcement every minute giving the exact time in Coordinated Universal Time. Mariners have long relied on it for celestial navigation, calling it the Time Tick. Pilots, scientists, and engineers have used it to calibrate instruments with extraordinary precision.

The station's role has shifted with time. Newer systems now carry much of the world's timekeeping, yet WWV keeps ticking for anyone with a shortwave radio, driven by the same obsession with precision it has had for more than a century.

There is something almost philosophical about a station whose entire purpose is to say, over and over, exactly what time it is. The station has been doing so since regular broadcasts began in nineteen twenty-three, long before the internet. It ticks on.