MSF Downtime No Signal 26th and 27th July
The UK’s time and frequency signal MSF, provided by the National Physical Laboratory out of Cumbria, will be down for essential maintenance on 26 and 27 July.
The unplanned downtime is to allow essential maintenance to be carried out in safety. The MSF transmitter will stop broadcasting the MSF signal on 26 and 27 July between 08.00 and 20.00 (BST – 07:00 GMT/UTC) although it is possible the maintenance may be finished ahead of schedule in which case the signal will be turned on earlier.
Future maintenance is scheduled for the following times when the signal will also be turned off:
• 9 September 2010 from 10:00 BST to 14:00 BST
• 9 December 2010 from 10:00 UTC to 14:00 UTC
• 10 March 2011 from 10:00 UTC to 14:00 UTC
Problems for Time Synchronisation
Generally, most NTP time servers should be able to maintain a stable time during these brief outages and users of MSF time synchronisation devices should not experience any difficulties with the lack of MSF signal.
However, those users who require high levels of accuracy and reliability and find the MSF outages affect them should perhaps look to a GPS NTP server.
GPS time servers receive their time signals from the GPS network which is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and never experiences any outages.
