On 2020-01-15 03:04, Steve Allen wrote:
The reasons why Study Group VII recommended a text allowing multiple seconds are not evident, and neither are the reasons why Document VII/1008 was amended on the floor during the Plenary Assembly, but what the CCIR un-did in 1970 could still be re-done by ITU-R or a sucessor agency.
Isn't that obvious? If UTC cannot deviate from UT1 by more than 0.7 s (as Recommendation 460 originally stipulated) then UTC cannot have leaps by more than 1.4 s. Leaps by N s are only possible when |UTC - UT1| is allowed to be >= N/2 s. The draft version of Study Group VII (the one that allows for leaps in UTC by an integral number of seconds) specifies no bound for |UTC - UT1|. Michael Deckers.