>> I presume you don't have any sort of radio time standard there,
>> like MSF, DC77, and whatever the Colorado one is called, there?
>
>That's certainly something to look into. Cycle counting is easy
>enough to do, but there's no actual guarantee you picked the
>right time to start. There are times when it's more likely you'd
>get a good result though

NZ does have a time standard source - it is a Caesium Standard that drove a
2.5MHz transmitter that used to be just down the corridor when I worked at
the DSIR in Gracefield. I believe it is used to derive the time pips used on
the radio. I know that at least once the Americans went out and calibrated
it, I presume using the GPS satellites, as they used a satellite receiver,
and established an "exact location" for it. The GPS network must have been
"quite new" at the time as this would have been the mid-late 70's.

As to maintaining the power cycles on the mains distribution, I was on one
of my apprenticeship courses with a guy from the NZED (as it was then) and
he related having a mains driven clock in a power station along side a
pendulum driven grandfather clock, which was used as the "time standard"
(presumably checked against the radio beeps each day) and during the night
they aimed to get the mains driven clock to "catch up time" to the
grandfather clock.

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