New wrist watch
With my new found interest in time nuttiness I thought I should upgrade to a decently accurate watch. I had some features I was looking for and settled on a Casio Wave Ceptor. My second choice was an Eco Drive, but the Casio had the right mix of features at a good price.
As I was sitting outside reading the manual after buying it, I laid it flat on the table and started a manual sync to WWVB. The UI is pretty intuitive for having so few buttons and indicators. It quickly told me that it had found a stable signal, and about six minutes later it was synced. Pretty cool.
Anyone know what the drift is like in this watch if it can't find the signal for several days/weeks? I would hope that actual performance is a little better than the +/- 15 sec per month stated in the manual. I should trap it in a faraday bag for a while to test it...
Dan
I did much the same thing, but settled on the Seiko astron due to the lack
of LF time sync in Sydney. GPS for the win and satisfying the closet
horologist in me.
J
On 7 Jul 2015 3:22 pm, "D W" watsondaniel3@gmail.com wrote:
With my new found interest in time nuttiness I thought I should upgrade to
a decently accurate watch. I had some features I was looking for and
settled on a Casio Wave Ceptor. My second choice was an Eco Drive, but the
Casio had the right mix of features at a good price.
As I was sitting outside reading the manual after buying it, I laid it
flat on the table and started a manual sync to WWVB. The UI is pretty
intuitive for having so few buttons and indicators. It quickly told me that
it had found a stable signal, and about six minutes later it was synced.
Pretty cool.
Anyone know what the drift is like in this watch if it can't find the
signal for several days/weeks? I would hope that actual performance is a
little better than the +/- 15 sec per month stated in the manual. I should
trap it in a faraday bag for a while to test it...
Dan
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On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 12:45 AM, D W watsondaniel3@gmail.com wrote:
With my new found interest in time nuttiness I thought I should upgrade to a decently accurate watch. I had some features I was looking for and settled on a Casio Wave Ceptor. My second choice was an Eco Drive, but the Casio had the right mix of features at a good price.
As I was sitting outside reading the manual after buying it, I laid it flat on the table and started a manual sync to WWVB. The UI is pretty intuitive for having so few buttons and indicators. It quickly told me that it had found a stable signal, and about six minutes later it was synced. Pretty cool.
Anyone know what the drift is like in this watch if it can't find the signal for several days/weeks? I would hope that actual performance is a little better than the +/- 15 sec per month stated in the manual. I should trap it in a faraday bag for a while to test it...
I have a similar watch (the G-Shock GWM850-1 [1]) and have found it to
keep within one second (compared visually to synchronized railway
clocks in the UK and Switzerland) after 2 weeks of no signal.
For reference, I take off the watch when showering but otherwise wear
it continuously so the temperature of the watch is fairly consistent.
They're pretty solid watches, though I find it to be a bit finicky
when signal is marginal during the day: after locking to the signal it
will switch between L1 (the lowest signal strength) and L3 (the
highest) with a period of 20-30 seconds, which means it never syncs.
At night it's much better, and typically syncs after only two minutes.
Still, considering the whole thing fits on one's wrist and runs on a
solar-charged battery, it's remarkably advanced and I recommend it.
Cheers!
-Pete
[1] http://www.casio.com/products/Watches/G-Shock/GWM850-1/
--
Pete Stephenson
I too have a Wave Ceptor. If you put it in a metal box every night (it
tries to sync from 12midnight to 2AM) you may get it to run unlocked from
WWVB. Mine gets off by a few seconds every month when it runs unlocked, but
is never off by more than a fifth of a second when it locks every night.
Tim N3QE
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 6:45 PM, D W watsondaniel3@gmail.com wrote:
With my new found interest in time nuttiness I thought I should upgrade to
a decently accurate watch. I had some features I was looking for and
settled on a Casio Wave Ceptor. My second choice was an Eco Drive, but the
Casio had the right mix of features at a good price.
As I was sitting outside reading the manual after buying it, I laid it
flat on the table and started a manual sync to WWVB. The UI is pretty
intuitive for having so few buttons and indicators. It quickly told me that
it had found a stable signal, and about six minutes later it was synced.
Pretty cool.
Anyone know what the drift is like in this watch if it can't find the
signal for several days/weeks? I would hope that actual performance is a
little better than the +/- 15 sec per month stated in the manual. I should
trap it in a faraday bag for a while to test it...
Dan
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and follow the instructions there.
Two data points for one watch:
When I bought a Casio PAW-1300, it was about 20 seconds fast. It said that
it had last synced on September 24, but that information does not include
the year. It was now June 10, so it had been running without a radio sync
for at least 9 months (though it could have been 9 months plus 1 year, or
plus 2 years...). If we assume the delay is only 9 months for 20 seconds
of error, that's a error of about 2.8 seconds/month or about 1 PPM.
A year later, the same watch got stored in a drawer where there was no
light and poor radio reception. After 26 days without a successful radio
sync, it had gained 2 seconds.
(On the other hand, the watch does not handle a leap second when the leap
second actually occurs. It simply keeps counting, so it ended up being 1
second fast after the recent June 30 leap second. It was correct the next
morning, after its usual overnight sync to Colorado.)
I normally leave the watch on the window ledge of a window approximately
facing Colorado (I'm near Toronto). It gets lots of light to keep the
battery charged, and reliably syncs every night. It has become my "master"
time source that I sync all my other watches to when adjusting them.
(Someday I need to build a time display for one of my GPS receivers, but
the Casio works well enough).
- Dave
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 6:45 PM, D W watsondaniel3@gmail.com wrote:
With my new found interest in time nuttiness I thought I should upgrade to
a decently accurate watch. I had some features I was looking for and
settled on a Casio Wave Ceptor. My second choice was an Eco Drive, but the
Casio had the right mix of features at a good price.
As I was sitting outside reading the manual after buying it, I laid it
flat on the table and started a manual sync to WWVB. The UI is pretty
intuitive for having so few buttons and indicators. It quickly told me that
it had found a stable signal, and about six minutes later it was synced.
Pretty cool.
Anyone know what the drift is like in this watch if it can't find the
signal for several days/weeks? I would hope that actual performance is a
little better than the +/- 15 sec per month stated in the manual. I should
trap it in a faraday bag for a while to test it...
Dan
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D W watsondaniel3@gmail.com writes:
I had some features I was looking for and settled on a Casio Wave
Ceptor.
I have a Casio Pathfinder PAW-2000, which syncs to WWVB (and in theory
to 5 other reference stations).
As I was sitting outside reading the manual after buying it, I laid it
flat on the table and started a manual sync to WWVB. The UI is pretty
intuitive for having so few buttons and indicators. It quickly told me
that it had found a stable signal, and about six minutes later it was
synced. Pretty cool.
In ~Boston, mine syncs at night, and I have been unable to get it to
manually sync. At a pub in downton Fort Collins at 1700, it synced
just fine :-)
Anyone know what the drift is like in this watch if it can't find the
signal for several days/weeks? I would hope that actual performance is
a little better than the +/- 15 sec per month stated in the manual. I
should trap it in a faraday bag for a while to test it...
I would hope that the watch would self-calibrate from the daily syncs,
and adjust the free run rate accordingly, but it doesn't seem to. I
find that when I travel (to anywhere but near CO) it doesn't sync at
night. My watch ends up slow pretty reliably, on the order of about a
second per week. I haven't measured it precisely, mostly because I
don't have a good way to measure from the display. Perhaps I should use
audio from the on-hour chime.
On mine, syncing can be turned off, but in most places, I suspect you
don't need much of a Faraday cage.
Last night I put it by a window with 12 o'clock facing out as suggested in the manual. It says that it synced this morning at 12:04, so I can only assume it started at midnight and took four minutes. Spot checking it against the NIST website throughout the day, I can't visually see any difference in the edge of the second. Very happy with it so far.
But I probably will do a no sync test some time. Leaving it in a metal box away from a window at night sounds quite reasonable and easy to set up. I'll do it for a week and see what happens.
Dan
On Jul 7, 2015, at 6:19 AM, Dave Martindale dave.martindale@gmail.com wrote:
Two data points for one watch:
When I bought a Casio PAW-1300, it was about 20 seconds fast. It said that
it had last synced on September 24, but that information does not include
the year. It was now June 10, so it had been running without a radio sync
for at least 9 months (though it could have been 9 months plus 1 year, or
plus 2 years...). If we assume the delay is only 9 months for 20 seconds
of error, that's a error of about 2.8 seconds/month or about 1 PPM.
A year later, the same watch got stored in a drawer where there was no
light and poor radio reception. After 26 days without a successful radio
sync, it had gained 2 seconds.
(On the other hand, the watch does not handle a leap second when the leap
second actually occurs. It simply keeps counting, so it ended up being 1
second fast after the recent June 30 leap second. It was correct the next
morning, after its usual overnight sync to Colorado.)
I normally leave the watch on the window ledge of a window approximately
facing Colorado (I'm near Toronto). It gets lots of light to keep the
battery charged, and reliably syncs every night. It has become my "master"
time source that I sync all my other watches to when adjusting them.
(Someday I need to build a time display for one of my GPS receivers, but
the Casio works well enough).
- Dave
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 6:45 PM, D W watsondaniel3@gmail.com wrote:
With my new found interest in time nuttiness I thought I should upgrade to
a decently accurate watch. I had some features I was looking for and
settled on a Casio Wave Ceptor. My second choice was an Eco Drive, but the
Casio had the right mix of features at a good price.
As I was sitting outside reading the manual after buying it, I laid it
flat on the table and started a manual sync to WWVB. The UI is pretty
intuitive for having so few buttons and indicators. It quickly told me that
it had found a stable signal, and about six minutes later it was synced.
Pretty cool.
Anyone know what the drift is like in this watch if it can't find the
signal for several days/weeks? I would hope that actual performance is a
little better than the +/- 15 sec per month stated in the manual. I should
trap it in a faraday bag for a while to test it...
Dan
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time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
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and follow the instructions there.