Time and frequency activities at SP in Sweden

Other conference contribution, 2009

The national time and frequency laboratory of Sweden has since 1995 been a part of the measurement technology department at the SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden. The laboratory is responsible for maintaining a realization of Swedish standard time and the dissemination of this time scale in Sweden. The objective of the laboratory is to support and supply Swedish industry and authorities with accurate measures of time and frequency by instrument calibration, knowledge transfer, time dissemination, and research and development. Swedish standard time is connected by law to UTC as maintained by the BIPM. UTC (SP) is the realization of UTC in Sweden and is traceable to UTC via BIPM and time transfer using the GPS and TWSTFT techniques. This paper describes the generation and maintenance of UTC (SP) and the equipment, including clocks and time transfer equipment, needed for this task as well as the concept of a "Distributed Time Scale" using alternate versions of UTC (SP) maintained at sister laboratories in Sweden. The paper presents also activities related to the dissemination of Swedish standard time including GPS time transfer, Network Time Protocol (NTP), telephone time code, and a speaking clock. Finally, research activities including time transfer in optical fiber networks, continuous GNSS carrier-phase processing, and Kalman-filter-based ensemble clock generation are briefly presented.