Certain aspects of the present disclosure provide techniques for wireless communication by a station generally including obtaining a frame that includes a partial representation of a target time value, wherein the target time value is based on a portion of a current time synchronization function (TSF) value associated with when the frame was obtained, adjusting the portion of the current TSF value if a recovered value for the target time value represents a time in the past, and recovering the target time value based on the partial representation of the target time value and the adjusted portion of the current TSF value.