Quote Originally Posted by cunninghamjohn View Post
I have been sat with a pen jotting down the 1s and 0s but not yet deciphered it into anything meaningful.
That would be useful as a means of seeing if your receiver is correctly picking up the signal and as a learning aid, but otherwise not needed.

Your clock will never be accurate until you decode a whole minute's worth of time information and set your clock from that. You can then use that to perhaps update a RTC chip, which in turn keeps your clock running until the next time you decide to do an update from MSF, if you want some form of backup.

I won't comment on the supply to your receiver, or the level of its output as the latter might depend on how you ultimately decide to detect the pulses.

If you care to PM me with your email address, I will send you a document that I prepared for the local U3A Science and Technology group which I think clarifies the major part of the data stream format, omitting the niceties.