[LEAPSECS] operational time -- What's in a name?

[Tony Finch]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Rob Seaman wrote:

>

> Like I said, the clocks remained synced through several visits suggesting that

> they received a signal on a regular schedule.  They do turn the lights off at

> night, I presume.  The underlying clocks are undoubtedly crap, but likely

> can't drift very far in a day.  I do tend to donate first thing in the

> morning.


It seems that the reason my MSF clock didn't switch to DST was its
position - moving it allowed it to resync correctly. (Possibly the
problem was it faced west and the transmitter is north.) I didn't notice
the lack of sync earlier because the clock has no sync indicator, and its
quartz mechanism was accurate to within a second over three months. My
quartz wristwatch is similarly accurate, even though it lacks temperature
stability because I don't wear it all the time. Like you I expected them
to be much worse, probably because of the bad reputation of quartz
oscillators in computers.

Tony.
-- 
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