Solve : Wow! I got an Atomic Clock!?

1.	Solve : Wow! I got an Atomic Clock!?
Answer» This is from dictation. WOW! Look what I have! I got an atomic clock. No, not a nuclear reactor, it is a wrist watch that is tied by radio to the atomic clock in the state of Colorado. I had never known there was such a thing available. How is it possible for an ordinary wristwatch to have a radio and it that can pick up a signal some 2000 miles away? Well, I googled it and found out that it is something that has been available for a while and I just didn't know about it. So here is my question. How can I find out more information about how this thing works? There is a lot of technology involved in this thing and it's hard to understand how it's even possible with this thing to work. Use a goal we had wristwatches that had a quartz element in them and Very accurate time. This one also, apparently, uses a quartz element for high precision. What is more about this wristwatch is its ability to synchronize a time signal at least once a day with the the national standard timebase. Of course I know that there are standard broadcasts on 5, 10 and 15 MHz. However, these broadcasts are very in coverage according to the time of day. What little information I found that this device uses the very low frequency, specifically 60 KHZ, to receive digital data that will update the clock at least once a day. So I was wondering, does anybody here have a good technical knowledge of how this thing works? It's hard to believe the thing actually works. Furthermore, this and also has a small speaker and it and it talks to me and tells me what time it is when I press a button. So I am very proud of this gift someone gave to me. I really enjoy having it and wondering how is it possible for something so small have so much built into it. End. How technical do you want it? The atomic clock controls equipment in Colorado that provides a time code, this is used to modulate the 60 kHz carrier. Your watch has a quartz controlled oscillator in a clock chip. It also has an antenna, and the chip periodically decodes the broadcast time code and corrects the running clock in the watch. The low frequency of 60 kHz (long wavelength of 5000 metres) means that the ground wave of the transmitter can cover most of the continental United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_clock It should be said that you don't really have 'an atomic clock on your wrist', despite what advertisements may say. What you have is an ordinary quartz clock which is corrected for drift periodically (sometimes only once a day) by an atomic clock broadcasting time signals 2000 miles away, with all that this implies - radio signals travel at the speed of light, so by the time the time code reaches your watch it is already (2000/186000) seconds old. That's nearly 11 milliseconds. So the accuracy will be less than that. But this is still better than a drifting quartz clock you have to correct manually. if you want better precision, you can get clocks that get their time from GPS satellites - accuracies in the 100-nanosecond range are possible with undegraded GPS signals and correct receiver position. 1 millisecond is 1 million nanoseconds. For me, 11 milliseconds is good. At my age it becomes less important. It does not always update. It might be where I place it on the dresser. Shouyld it be facing to the east? On You Tube, but mine has white face. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOtjMrG0JnA I found another link. On Time 101006 Talking Atomic Watch Instructions Manual https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1138184/On-Time-101006-Talking-Atomic-Watch.html And more video s You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=talking+watches These are great for elderly and near blind people. Quote It does not always update. It might be where I place it on the dresser. I've had this same issue with the self-setting alarm clocks where I live in New Hampshire not getting the radio signal. So I actually just have an older alarm clock that while not as precise as an atomic clock update for drift, its close enough for me. And actually I have 4 older AA battery operated electro-mechanical clocks in my room which have ticking at different 1 second intervals and it for some reason makes it easier to sleep in a room with 4 ticks per second than hearing just 1 per second ticking. The 4 per second make it easier to block out vs silent room with 1 second delay between the ticking sound. My daughter told me that my room sounds like Doc Browns workshop from Back to the Future with all the many clocks ticking away. I looked it up and sure enough she was correct. LOL Frustrating thing with the auto-set clocks that get the signal from atomic clock signal is that they dont have a manual clock setting to set them when the signal isnt picked up, so i ended up returning it for an older style radio alarm clock that can be manually set and the 3volt battery to old the time and alarm preference if power goes out.This is becoming much more serious than I expected. It appears that there may be some kind of universal time plot going on here. The standard time signals being broadcast in the United States the been around for years and years and almost everybody knows that the United States has transmitters on five, 10, and 15 MHz that can be heard in almost any part of the world is sometime during the day or night. But for some reason somebody thought it was necessary to have a more universal time system that could travel all over the United States and also be available in Europe for those that wanted it. I have no idea how it works in Europe, but the YouTube videos indicate this atomic wristwatch also has a setting for Europe and the UK, but no clue as to what frequency it uses for those of you on the other side of the pond. Anyway, here comes a really bad news. Somehow I stole the crossed a news item that indicated the president of the United States is going to cancel this service for the wristwatches. Apparently it cost several million dollars to keep all those watches going. Now there is no indication about how many of these watches have been sold, but it seems that the United States government does not want to pay to have these watches tell perfect time. Maybe the watches should've been sold with a subscription to the United States NIST broadcasts. Also, if they do shut down the service, several people will be laid off work at the facility in Colorado. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_of_Standards_and_Technology None of this makes any sense. Why go through all the bother the building the most accurate time system in the world and then decide too expensive to keep it running good. Never mind, with the money we s say might help a little bit with the next project of sending some Americans to Mars. If anybody wants to figure out how to reset these wristwatches, there are several videos on YouTube that are rather long-winded and going to all the details of which button you can press and how you can get it to reset itself. It is rather involved and it will probably take you all day to watch all the videos. Apparently, there is some way to reset the thing manually. Also, when you have to replace the battery you have to reset the wristwatch hands and secondhand. Sounds like a real bother. Maybe they should do some work on the battery and make the battery lasts longer. Now back to my original thought. I just cannot see how a little fair right antenna inside of a wristwatch case would possibly pick up a radio signal 2000 miles away on very low frequency. It seems to define the laws of physics. If you want to get a 500 m way signal, you've got to have a piece of wire it's more than just a mere two long. I just cannot believe that a little ferrite rod would pick up enough energy to provide a digital time signal that would be accurate to a few milliseconds. Apparently I do not understand how the thing works. And yes, there is a manual for it somewhere on one of the manual sites. I have yet to download it and try to read it. I think I watched the YouTube videos instead. Besides I am having a hard time going to sleep tonight so if I want those videos maybe I will fall asleep. Microphone off. There is a very comprehensive document at the NIST web site which includes details of the low frequency transmitters around the world, for example Europe is covered by two stations, one in the UK and one in Germany. https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/1877.pdf Geek - the antenna - the NIST article says that a watch presents a challenge for the antenna designer... "since the antenna must be inconspicuous and fit inside a very small space. Some wristwatches, particularly early models such as the one shown in Figure 9, placed the antenna inside the wrist band, but this meant that the band could be replaced only with another band of the same type. More recent designers place miniature antennas, often less than 20 mm wide, inside the watch itself as shown in Figure 15." SEE PICTURES BELOW. A watch or clock can cope with a very weak signal from the antenna because the time code is carried at 1 bit per second by dropping the carrier power for a varying time, 200 milliseconds for a 0 bit, 500 milliseconds for a 1 bit, and 800 milliseconds for a position marker so the receiver knows where it is in the bit sequence. The receiver looks at the pulse width, not the amplitude like an AM radio does. This means a very weak signal is all you need. A full time code takes one minute to send. Governments use very long wave radio to carry data at a very low data rate to submerged submarines since the radio waves will penetrate sea water. A watch will need to conserve battery power so typically they only update between one and three times a day, and will make several attempts to get a full time code if the signal is weak. The organisation I work for decided that radio controlled clocks were a good idea, and boy, are they a pain in the censored!!! The first time you use one, or if you replace the battery, it has to get a time code before it will even work at all. You put the battery in and the hands move to 12 o'clock. Then it waits for a code. The instructions say "you may need to place the clock near a window and WAIT up to 2 hours". When it gets the code, the hands move to the right time, you can then take it to its proper place and hang it on the wall, and you are good, corrected by radio or not, until the battery dies. My office must be in a bad zone because the clocks are all showing different times, but within 5 minutes of each other. As we all have networked PCs, and DESK phones with a display, that give accurate time, we never look at the censored things, except that the slowest one is good to use for your arrival time and the fastest one for going home in the evening. I will put this separately since it's political. Long wave transmitters worldwide are a problem, because they were typically built decades ago, and the technology is obsolete. The BBC has a 198 kHz transmitter that will probably be shut down in the next five years because nobody makes the vacuum tubes any more (they are 6 feet tall) and they only have 2 left. It would not surprise me if The Trump was told that WWVB can't last much longer, and decided to make it seem like his idea to shut it down as part of his anti-'big government' agenda. Politicians do things like that all over the world, I have to say. At the moment GPS (satellite) watches and clocks cost around $200 or more, but there is no reason to think that they won't get cheaper if there is money to be made selling lots of them if the long-wave ground based technology comes to an end. Already you can get a hobby GPS module for less than $20 and connect it to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. https://randomnerdtutorials.com/guide-to-neo-6m-gps-module-with-arduino/ https://www.cooking-hacks.com/documentation/tutorials/gps-module-arduino-raspberry-pi-tutorial You can even make a Raspberry Pi act as a short-range long wave transmitter to broadcast a signal to a radio clock or watches in your house, so you could have GPS accuracy on your old clocks when WWVB and the like shut down. This one transmits NTP (network) time but you could use GPS time instead: https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/01/18/radio-time-station-transmitter-using-the-raspberry-pi-piday-raspberrypi-raspberry_pi/ Note: WWVB, along with NIST's shortwave time code-and-announcement stations WWV and WWVH, were proposed for defunding and elimination in the 2019 NIST budget. However, the final 2019 NIST budget preserved funding for the three stations.I all wanted was to know what time it is. On Amazon you can get a kindle document that explains the politics of the NIST. It is outside of my budget, at about $2,000 a copy. https://www.amazon.in/Assessment-Institute-Technology-Engineering-Laboratory/dp/0309367352/ref=sr_1_3?qid=1581273374&refinements=p_27%3Anist&s=books&sr=1-3 Quote The mission of the Engineering Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness through measurement science and standards for technology-intensive manufacturing, construction, and cyberphysical systems in ways that enhance economic prosperity and improve the quality of life. To SUPPORT this mission, the Engineering Laboratory has developed thrusts in smart manufacturing, construction, and cyberphysical systems; in sustainable and energy-efficient manufacturing materials and infrastructure; and in disaster-resilient buildings, infrastructure, and communities. The technical work of the Engineering Laboratory is performed in five divisions: Intelligent Systems; Materials and Structural Systems; Energy and Environment; Systems Integration; and Fire Research; and two offices: Applied Economics Office and Smart Grid Program Office. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Engineering Laboratory Fiscal Year 2014 assesses the scientific and technical work performed by the NIST Engineering Laboratory. This report evaluates the organization's technical programs, portfolio of scientific expertise within the organization, adequacy of the organization's facilities, equipment, and human resources, and the effectiveness by which the organization disseminates its program outp Please ! Somebody stop this thread. You did ask.Thank you Salmon I have once again learnt so much from a post here. Great work and very informative, You have so much knowledge you share so willingly. Yes, Salmon Trout did a great job. First of all, let me thank Salmon Trout for contributing to this thread and providing the interesting information about the time signals used in both the United States and Europe. I did not realize that such low frequencies were being used for time synchronization. My I thought was those frequency are rarely used by submarines for sending messages back and forth in Morse code. Speaking of Morse code, use ago there was an argument that people should continue to use and learn Morse code in case some day all microphones in the world should disappear. I never quite understood how all the microphones would disappear. Anyway, this has been educational, but it is too much to try to comprehend all the details involved in how this stuff works. I think I need to take a break and go do something else for a while. Maybe I'll go watch a Netflix movie. Anyhow, I don't think I want to know anymore about my atomic wristwatch. Just too much information, is like trying to – nevermind, it's not like anything. Last line of dictation. Well you started it... Never underestimate Salmon...Why ask a question, quite forcefully, if you don't want an answer? Ditto what Lisa_maree said. Posts like these are the reason I peruse this forum even when nothing's wrong with my stuff.

Answer»

This is from dictation.
WOW! Look what I have!
I got an atomic clock. No, not a nuclear reactor, it is a wrist watch that is tied by radio to the atomic clock in the state of Colorado.
I had never known there was such a thing available. How is it possible for an ordinary wristwatch to have a radio and it that can pick up a signal some 2000 miles away?
Well, I googled it and found out that it is something that has been available for a while and I just didn't know about it.
So here is my question. How can I find out more information about how this thing works? There is a lot of technology involved in this thing and it's hard to understand how it's even possible with this thing to work. Use a goal we had wristwatches that had a quartz element in them and Very accurate time. This one also, apparently, uses a quartz element for high precision. What is more about this wristwatch is its ability to synchronize a time signal at least once a day with the the national standard timebase.
Of course I know that there are standard broadcasts on 5, 10 and 15 MHz. However, these broadcasts are very in coverage according to the time of day.
What little information I found that this device uses the very low frequency, specifically 60 KHZ, to receive digital data that will update the clock at least once a day.
So I was wondering, does anybody here have a good technical knowledge of how this thing works? It's hard to believe the thing actually works. Furthermore, this and also has a small speaker and it and it talks to me and tells me what time it is when I press a button. So I am very proud of this gift someone gave to me.

I really enjoy having it and wondering how is it possible for something so small have so much built into it.

End. How technical do you want it? The atomic clock controls equipment in Colorado that provides a time code, this is used to modulate the 60 kHz carrier. Your watch has a quartz controlled oscillator in a clock chip. It also has an antenna, and the chip periodically decodes the broadcast time code and corrects the running clock in the watch. The low frequency of 60 kHz (long wavelength of 5000 metres) means that the ground wave of the transmitter can cover most of the continental United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_clock
It should be said that you don't really have 'an atomic clock on your wrist', despite what advertisements may say. What you have is an ordinary quartz clock which is corrected for drift periodically (sometimes only once a day) by an atomic clock broadcasting time signals 2000 miles away, with all that this implies - radio signals travel at the speed of light, so by the time the time code reaches your watch it is already (2000/186000) seconds old. That's nearly 11 milliseconds. So the accuracy will be less than that. But this is still better than a drifting quartz clock you have to correct manually.

if you want better precision, you can get clocks that get their time from GPS satellites - accuracies in the 100-nanosecond range are possible with undegraded GPS signals and correct receiver position. 1 millisecond is 1 million nanoseconds.
For me, 11 milliseconds is good. At my age it becomes less important.

It does not always update. It might be where I place it on the dresser.

Shouyld it be facing to the east?

On You Tube, but mine has white face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOtjMrG0JnA
I found another link.
On Time 101006 Talking Atomic Watch Instructions Manual
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1138184/On-Time-101006-Talking-Atomic-Watch.html
And more video s You Tube.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=talking+watches
These are great for elderly and near blind people. Quote

It does not always update. It might be where I place it on the dresser.

I've had this same issue with the self-setting alarm clocks where I live in New Hampshire not getting the radio signal.

So I actually just have an older alarm clock that while not as precise as an atomic clock update for drift, its close enough for me. And actually I have 4 older AA battery operated electro-mechanical clocks in my room which have ticking at different 1 second intervals and it for some reason makes it easier to sleep in a room with 4 ticks per second than hearing just 1 per second ticking. The 4 per second make it easier to block out vs silent room with 1 second delay between the ticking sound.

My daughter told me that my room sounds like Doc Browns workshop from Back to the Future with all the many clocks ticking away. I looked it up and sure enough she was correct. LOL

Frustrating thing with the auto-set clocks that get the signal from atomic clock signal is that they dont have a manual clock setting to set them when the signal isnt picked up, so i ended up returning it for an older style radio alarm clock that can be manually set and the 3volt battery to old the time and alarm preference if power goes out.This is becoming much more serious than I expected.

It appears that there may be some kind of universal time plot going on here.

The standard time signals being broadcast in the United States the been around for years and years and almost everybody knows that the United States has transmitters on five, 10, and 15 MHz that can be heard in almost any part of the world is sometime during the day or night.

But for some reason somebody thought it was necessary to have a more universal time system that could travel all over the United States and also be available in Europe for those that wanted it. I have no idea how it works in Europe, but the YouTube videos indicate this atomic wristwatch also has a setting for Europe and the UK, but no clue as to what frequency it uses for those of you on the other side of the pond.
Anyway, here comes a really bad news. Somehow I stole the crossed a news item that indicated the president of the United States is going to cancel this service for the wristwatches. Apparently it cost several million dollars to keep all those watches going. Now there is no indication about how many of these watches have been sold, but it seems that the United States government does not want to pay to have these watches tell perfect time. Maybe the watches should've been sold with a subscription to the United States NIST broadcasts. Also, if they do shut down the service, several people will be laid off work at the facility in Colorado.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_of_Standards_and_Technology

None of this makes any sense. Why go through all the bother the building the most accurate time system in the world and then decide too expensive to keep it running good. Never mind, with the money we s say might help a little bit with the next project of sending some Americans to Mars.
If anybody wants to figure out how to reset these wristwatches, there are several videos on YouTube that are rather long-winded and going to all the details of which button you can press and how you can get it to reset itself. It is rather involved and it will probably take you all day to watch all the videos. Apparently, there is some way to reset the thing manually. Also, when you have to replace the battery you have to reset the wristwatch hands and secondhand. Sounds like a real bother. Maybe they should do some work on the battery and make the battery lasts longer.
Now back to my original thought. I just cannot see how a little fair right antenna inside of a wristwatch case would possibly pick up a radio signal 2000 miles away on very low frequency. It seems to define the laws of physics. If you want to get a 500 m way signal, you've got to have a piece of wire it's more than just a mere two long. I just cannot believe that a little ferrite rod would pick up enough energy to provide a digital time signal that would be accurate to a few milliseconds. Apparently I do not understand how the thing works.
And yes, there is a manual for it somewhere on one of the manual sites. I have yet to download it and try to read it. I think I watched the YouTube videos instead. Besides I am having a hard time going to sleep tonight so if I want those videos maybe I will fall asleep.

Microphone off.
There is a very comprehensive document at the NIST web site which includes details of the low frequency transmitters around the world, for example Europe is covered by two stations, one in the UK and one in Germany.

https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/1877.pdf

Geek - the antenna - the NIST article says that a watch presents a challenge for the antenna designer... "since the antenna must be inconspicuous and fit inside a very small space. Some wristwatches, particularly early models such as the one shown in Figure 9, placed the antenna inside the wrist band, but this meant that the band could be replaced only with another band of the same type. More recent designers place miniature antennas, often less than 20 mm wide, inside the watch itself as shown in Figure 15."

SEE PICTURES BELOW.

A watch or clock can cope with a very weak signal from the antenna because the time code is carried at 1 bit per second by dropping the carrier power for a varying time, 200 milliseconds for a 0 bit, 500 milliseconds for a 1 bit, and 800 milliseconds for a position marker so the receiver knows where it is in the bit sequence. The receiver looks at the pulse width, not the amplitude like an AM radio does. This means a very weak signal is all you need. A full time code takes one minute to send.

Governments use very long wave radio to carry data at a very low data rate to submerged submarines since the radio waves will penetrate sea water.

A watch will need to conserve battery power so typically they only update between one and three times a day, and will make several attempts to get a full time code if the signal is weak.

The organisation I work for decided that radio controlled clocks were a good idea, and boy, are they a pain in the *censored*!!! The first time you use one, or if you replace the battery, it has to get a time code before it will even work at all. You put the battery in and the hands move to 12 o'clock. Then it waits for a code. The instructions say "you may need to place the clock near a window and WAIT up to 2 hours". When it gets the code, the hands move to the right time, you can then take it to its proper place and hang it on the wall, and you are good, corrected by radio or not, until the battery dies. My office must be in a bad zone because the clocks are all showing different times, but within 5 minutes of each other. As we all have networked PCs, and DESK phones with a display, that give accurate time, we never look at the *censored* things, except that the slowest one is good to use for your arrival time and the fastest one for going home in the evening.

I will put this separately since it's political. Long wave transmitters worldwide are a problem, because they were typically built decades ago, and the technology is obsolete. The BBC has a 198 kHz transmitter that will probably be shut down in the next five years because nobody makes the vacuum tubes any more (they are 6 feet tall) and they only have 2 left. It would not surprise me if The Trump was told that WWVB can't last much longer, and decided to make it seem like his idea to shut it down as part of his anti-'big government' agenda. Politicians do things like that all over the world, I have to say. At the moment GPS (satellite) watches and clocks cost around $200 or more, but there is no reason to think that they won't get cheaper if there is money to be made selling lots of them if the long-wave ground based technology comes to an end. Already you can get a hobby GPS module for less than $20 and connect it to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.

https://randomnerdtutorials.com/guide-to-neo-6m-gps-module-with-arduino/

https://www.cooking-hacks.com/documentation/tutorials/gps-module-arduino-raspberry-pi-tutorial

You can even make a Raspberry Pi act as a short-range long wave transmitter to broadcast a signal to a radio clock or watches in your house, so you could have GPS accuracy on your old clocks when WWVB and the like shut down.

This one transmits NTP (network) time but you could use GPS time instead:

https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/01/18/radio-time-station-transmitter-using-the-raspberry-pi-piday-raspberrypi-raspberry_pi/

Note: WWVB, along with NIST's shortwave time code-and-announcement stations WWV and WWVH, were proposed for defunding and elimination in the 2019 NIST budget. However, the final 2019 NIST budget preserved funding for the three stations.I all wanted was to know what time it is.
On Amazon you can get a kindle document that explains the politics of the NIST. It is outside of my budget, at about $2,000 a copy.

https://www.amazon.in/Assessment-Institute-Technology-Engineering-Laboratory/dp/0309367352/ref=sr_1_3?qid=1581273374&refinements=p_27%3Anist&s=books&sr=1-3
Quote

The mission of the Engineering Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness through measurement science and standards for technology-intensive manufacturing, construction, and cyberphysical systems in ways that enhance economic prosperity and improve the quality of life. To SUPPORT this mission, the Engineering Laboratory has developed thrusts in smart manufacturing, construction, and cyberphysical systems; in sustainable and energy-efficient manufacturing materials and infrastructure; and in disaster-resilient buildings, infrastructure, and communities. The technical work of the Engineering Laboratory is performed in five divisions: Intelligent Systems; Materials and Structural Systems; Energy and Environment; Systems Integration; and Fire Research; and two offices: Applied Economics Office and Smart Grid Program Office. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Engineering Laboratory Fiscal Year 2014 assesses the scientific and technical work performed by the NIST Engineering Laboratory. This report evaluates the organization's technical programs, portfolio of scientific expertise within the organization, adequacy of the organization's facilities, equipment, and human resources, and the effectiveness by which the organization disseminates its program outp

Please ! Somebody stop this thread.
You did ask.Thank you Salmon

I have once again learnt so much from a post here.
Great work and very informative, You have so much knowledge you share so willingly.
Yes, Salmon Trout did a great job.
First of all, let me thank Salmon Trout for contributing to this thread and providing the interesting information about the time signals used in both the United States and Europe.
I did not realize that such low frequencies were being used for time synchronization. My I thought was those frequency are rarely used by submarines for sending messages back and forth in Morse code. Speaking of Morse code, use ago there was an argument that people should continue to use and learn Morse code in case some day all microphones in the world should disappear. I never quite understood how all the microphones would disappear.
Anyway, this has been educational, but it is too much to try to comprehend all the details involved in how this stuff works. I think I need to take a break and go do something else for a while. Maybe I'll go watch a Netflix movie.
Anyhow, I don't think I want to know anymore about my atomic wristwatch. Just too much information, is like trying to – nevermind, it's not like anything.

Last line of dictation. Well you started it...

Never underestimate Salmon...Why ask a question, quite forcefully, if you don't want an answer?
Ditto what Lisa_maree said.
Posts like these are the reason I peruse this forum even when nothing's wrong with my stuff.

Solve : Wow! I got an Atomic Clock!?

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