Comments on the October 1970 Metrologia Paper "The U.S. Naval Observatory Clock Time Reference and the Performance of a Sample of Atomic Clocks"

The paper cited in the title by Winkler, Hall, and Percival (WHP) documents some important aspects of the widely referenced United States Naval Observatory (USNO) Time Scale system. We augment the text of WHP regarding the mutual synchronization to within 5 μs of the Time Scale, UTC(USNO), with another widely referenced time scale, the National Bureau of Standard UTC(NBS) Time Scale. We show that some of the information available to WHP can be utilized to give even more precision to the USNO Time Scale system and that some of that information has been improperly interpreted causing some errors by WHP in their conclusions regarding time scale precision, clock weighting factors, and drift in rate of the time scale.