Am 16.10.2012 um 15:48 schrieb Paul E Condon:
I think you are mistaken about the sync only once a day. The signals giving the year month and day are given once a day, but the precise time-tics are given throughout the day. My clock has an indication when it is receiving the radio signal which goes out when I move to a place where the signal is weak, or when I change the battery and it has not yet locked-in on the rhythm of the signal. Then, for a time, the hour,minute,and second are good, but the date is wrong. Then after a while, the correct date and day-of-week appear. I think the date signal is actually more frequent than once a day, but definitely less frequent than once a second. This is also the way that it is claimed to work in the marketing materials.
Maybe you have a better radio clock, but most the cheap ones (20 - 40 EUR/USD) sync once a day, or on demand by reset.
The process is as follows: 1. The sender emits the signal as a pulse every second (low or high bit)2. The bits sent in one minute (59, 60 or 61 seconds) form a full record containing date, time, daylight saving, leap year, leap seconds and other information 3. The antenna of your clock receives the signal and tries to get the complete information of a cycle. This can need many minutes if the signal is noisy. Or it can fail. Or it only works in the night because of 'noise'. 4. The clock tries to move the clockhands in the correct position, and/ or tries to set the displays for date, weekday, and second.
The last two radio clocks I threw away had problems with step 4. They synced after reset (I tried often and also changed batteries, cleaned the contacts etc.), but the clockhands stopped at wrong positions. And it always was the same offset.
The reason for my puzzlement is that the clock has always behaved in a way consistent with the above --- for about twelve years starting when I lived in California and continuing here in Colorado, where I now live --- until recently when I noticed this 16sec offset.
Your wallclock is out of order.If you want to know it for sure, you can build a receiver for the signal, connect it to your computer and configure it into ntpd. There is enough documentation and software available for free about this. The material for one receiver costs around 10-20 USD. In my best time I had two time-servers with 6 such receivers connected to the servers. They received the British, Swiss and German time signals.
I have no knowledge of international time signals. I'm sure there is world-wide coordination, or perhaps the word is harmonization.
Time is coordinated internationally since more than 100 years. Each country has its own metrologic institute coordinating the time with the central bureau AFAIK in Paris. You can read everything about it in the internet.
If and since when the US take part of this coordination--I don't know. The US do not like international agreements. Have the US signed the Human Rights, or the international Woman Rights?
Helmut Wollmersdorfer