ATOMIC CLOCK SCREW UP

Sadly, there really is something wrong with your clock, or a spurious signal on a similar frequency. Give it another day before you pitch it, and it will probably selfcorrect.

you did not touch the button on the back that starts the fusion reaction did you.

that could set off a chain reaction that would soon endanger your whole community.

(do you have a bio-hazard suit handy?)




and welcome to a2k...

What are you talking about? Today is March 24, 2018. Did you oversleep?

I have an older one that seems to be in synch with the old DST schedule which ws the END of MArch. This clock of mine sort of just bops around for several weeks and then, miraculously, it sets itself. Im thinking that there was some older technology that only was set to do DST and ST by INTERVALS of seconds in the time between DST and ST.

Whod know whether Im full of it or not?

Is your atomic clock 3 years old?

That happened to me once.

When I was living in the dorms at Framingham State College in the late 1990's, I had an atomic clock/alarm radio. It must have been a particularly stressful semester but I was having a difficult time falling asleep and staying asleep.

I remember one night, I woke up in the middle of the night, the clock read the appropriate time (I can't remember the exact details) ... somewhere around 2 in the morning. But the date month, day, and year were off by a couple of decades: reading sometime in the late 1960's.

I assumed it was some kind of solar flare or solar wind that might have inadvertently tweaked the atomic clock radio signal. The clock fixed itself sometime the next day.

The clocks let us know when the end of the world is actually coming. My clock says 2029 every so ofetn. Is each clock assigned infornationabout our mortality?

Theres an episode for "THE ZONE"

I guess then my clock was telling me to invent a time machine so I have to travel back to 1960 something to die in the years before I was born.

1960 is the year I was born. I would have to travel back even further.

There's no need to be freaking out, EMT - atomic clocks operate on processes of the cesium 133 atom, meaning they have no connection to the rotation of our planet, so they must be adjusted every so often. Adjustment is an intermittent affair, since the planet's rotation changes - and that's why there's leap years,leap hours, leap seconds etc. The computer clocks are a different problem, usually due to incompetent programming for automatic switching to summer time and unrelated to cesium atoms. Wait a couple of days until all atomic clocks, on earth and on satellites, are synchronized, and if yours still doesn't work you can e-mail the US Naval Observatory (keeper of the cesium clocks) and complain about it.

http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/systime.html
If all else fails you can download a clock based on the motion of far-distant stars not affected by our rotation (sidereal time) here: http://www.radiosky.com/sidclockdownload.html

Give High Seas the Selected Answer ribbon !!

Since I too have one of the older ones (In my office) and a newer one (in the sunporch) and the older one ALWAYS resets itself several weeks later, is there some gizmo inside the clock that recognizes only the "Old" DST reset date?

Yes, but I don't know the details. Call or e-mail these people, they can tell you for sure:
http://www.usno.navy.mil/help/time

thanks, Ill try them.

Sometimes I'm spellbound and in awe of how much some people here on A2K know about something that is so esoteric as as a topic like this.

Hope I'm not breaking the spell here, but you're obviously not on the FAA mailing list - every time they send out an update on some new electronic wizardry they cautiously remind you to remember high-tech stuff breaks down on occasion so better not forget how you used to do things before! This is an actual excerpt from their latest advisory on the greater Philadelphia area, which just got its own TIS-B (Traffic Information Service - Broadcast), an automatic in-flight traffic and weather electronic updater:

Damn good advise.

On high tech breakdowns, I recently read an article on lithium batteries. Seems they are good for about three years, which is not big problem since the crap they usually power don't last that long anyway. So, how's your Prius doing - with its $10,000 battery pack?

HA, We were right. It seems that theres a piezo crytsal thats an "interval controller" inside the clock. This keeps the damn thing from trying to change time every day. The interav timer in the older clocks was set for a certqain cumulative frequency of oscillations and that puts the little clock in a "time change receptivity zone" that was originally coordinated to the time interval for DST and ST before we went on this new DST system. So, it appears Ill have to wait a few weeks until the thing recognizes the time interval.

Also the guy from the Bireau said that in the East Coast the reception isn really great so Id have to move it around the house.
My house is made of greenstone hich acts like a antenna so Ive never had the DST signal get ignored.
THANKS. I suppose I could find the quartz crystal and just squeeze it to speed up the osclillations. but I wouldnt know what the crystal mount even looks like.

so what's the half-life of an atomic clock?

Yes it's good advice, but it reinforces my greatest fear - best summarized in this New Yorker cartoon (see link, only thumbnail available for reproduction):
http://www.cartoonbank.com/2003/And-then-one-day-the-grid-went-down-and-never-came-back-up/invt/126576