US New Year countdown - accurate?
Hi folks,
Ignoring the travesty of a lyric change on John Lennon's classic song, did
anyone check to see if the clock countdown in Times Square was actually
accurate?
In times gone past countdowns have been notoriously off (worst I saw was a
tv personality using his own watch and it was 25 seconds out).
Oh and why we're at it here is my worst time-nut story...
Pulled up in a "Loading Zone 8-6pm" at 18:00:10. Got out, came back 4
minutes later to find a parking officer giving me a ticket.
Me: "Look at the time (showing my watch) - it's 6:04"
Him: "Not by my watch" (which said 5:59 at that point).
Me (massive sarcasm voice): "So. Let me get this straight. Despite
worldwide time standards keeping clocks accurate to billionths of a second
and costing millions of dollars, all that is now been binned and we now
keep world official time by your watch. Is that right?".
Him: "Bu..."
Me (interrupting and pulling out mobile): "Let's listen to the national
time standard shall we?" (I dial and put on speaker - his watch is a good
solid 5 minutes slow).
Him: Walks off screwing up ticket.
The sheer arrogance of the "Not by my watch" comment irks me to this day.
Jim
To me the ball drop/fireworks was different from the on-screen time on FOX
by a few secnds.
-John
=============h
Hi folks,
Ignoring the travesty of a lyric change on John Lennon's classic song, did
anyone check to see if the clock countdown in Times Square was actually
accurate?
In times gone past countdowns have been notoriously off (worst I saw was a
tv personality using his own watch and it was 25 seconds out).
Oh and why we're at it here is my worst time-nut story...
Pulled up in a "Loading Zone 8-6pm" at 18:00:10. Got out, came back 4
minutes later to find a parking officer giving me a ticket.
Me: "Look at the time (showing my watch) - it's 6:04"
Him: "Not by my watch" (which said 5:59 at that point).
Me (massive sarcasm voice): "So. Let me get this straight. Despite
worldwide time standards keeping clocks accurate to billionths of a second
and costing millions of dollars, all that is now been binned and we now
keep world official time by your watch. Is that right?".
Him: "Bu..."
Me (interrupting and pulling out mobile): "Let's listen to the national
time standard shall we?" (I dial and put on speaker - his watch is a good
solid 5 minutes slow).
Him: Walks off screwing up ticket.
The sheer arrogance of the "Not by my watch" comment irks me to this day.
Jim
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To unsubscribe, go to
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and follow the instructions there.
I think he was mostly ticked off because he came to work 5 minutes early...
Didier KO4BB
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless thingy while I do other things...
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Palfreyman jim77742@gmail.com
Sender: time-nuts-bounces@febo.com
Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2012 12:46:30
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurementtime-nuts@febo.com
Reply-To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
time-nuts@febo.com
Subject: [time-nuts] US New Year countdown - accurate?
Hi folks,
Ignoring the travesty of a lyric change on John Lennon's classic song, did
anyone check to see if the clock countdown in Times Square was actually
accurate?
In times gone past countdowns have been notoriously off (worst I saw was a
tv personality using his own watch and it was 25 seconds out).
Oh and why we're at it here is my worst time-nut story...
Pulled up in a "Loading Zone 8-6pm" at 18:00:10. Got out, came back 4
minutes later to find a parking officer giving me a ticket.
Me: "Look at the time (showing my watch) - it's 6:04"
Him: "Not by my watch" (which said 5:59 at that point).
Me (massive sarcasm voice): "So. Let me get this straight. Despite
worldwide time standards keeping clocks accurate to billionths of a second
and costing millions of dollars, all that is now been binned and we now
keep world official time by your watch. Is that right?".
Him: "Bu..."
Me (interrupting and pulling out mobile): "Let's listen to the national
time standard shall we?" (I dial and put on speaker - his watch is a good
solid 5 minutes slow).
Him: Walks off screwing up ticket.
The sheer arrogance of the "Not by my watch" comment irks me to this day.
Jim
time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.
But TV goes through a lot of buffering these days. I wouldn't expect it
to be too accurate.
I'm beginning to think this is not an uncommon thing. One of the local TV stations (KING 5) does "New Year's at the Needle" every year, and they always have an on-screen countdown to midnight.
For as long as I've had GPS-referenced clocks, their count has been off. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow (this year, slow by about 12 seconds).
You'd think a network broadcast station could afford a simple GPS clock. Apparently not...
Happy ticking.
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********
On 02-Jan-12 at 12:46 Jim Palfreyman wrote:
Hi folks,
Ignoring the travesty of a lyric change on John Lennon's classic song, did
anyone check to see if the clock countdown in Times Square was actually
accurate?
In times gone past countdowns have been notoriously off (worst I saw was a
tv personality using his own watch and it was 25 seconds out).
Oh and why we're at it here is my worst time-nut story...
Pulled up in a "Loading Zone 8-6pm" at 18:00:10. Got out, came back 4
minutes later to find a parking officer giving me a ticket.
Me: "Look at the time (showing my watch) - it's 6:04"
Him: "Not by my watch" (which said 5:59 at that point).
Me (massive sarcasm voice): "So. Let me get this straight. Despite
worldwide time standards keeping clocks accurate to billionths of a second
and costing millions of dollars, all that is now been binned and we now
keep world official time by your watch. Is that right?".
Him: "Bu..."
Me (interrupting and pulling out mobile): "Let's listen to the national
time standard shall we?" (I dial and put on speaker - his watch is a good
solid 5 minutes slow).
Him: Walks off screwing up ticket.
The sheer arrogance of the "Not by my watch" comment irks me to this day.
Jim
time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
To unsubscribe, go to
https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.
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kyrrin (at) bluefeathertech do/t c=o=m
"Quid Malmborg in Plano..."
On 01/02/2012 03:16 AM, gary wrote:
But TV goes through a lot of buffering these days. I wouldn't expect it
to be too accurate.
You need to recall that temporal compression of MPEG2/MPEG4 requires
time to buffer up and rebuild. You could even have at least two such
link, one from the OB-bus to the TV house, and another from the TV house
out to the transmitters. These days satellite is popular in the US for
transmitter feeds... not to speak of...
Looking at the TV and try to do timing is not very relevant. You should
get same minute, but not same second kind of offsets.
So, dropping the ball.. was someone there and compared to a sufficiently
accurate clock?
Cheers,
Magnus
On Sun, Jan 01, 2012 at 05:54:46PM -0800, J. Forster wrote:
To me the ball drop/fireworks was different from the on-screen time on FOX
by a few secnds.
I was watching the media pool HD satellite feed on AMC-1 and
through a broadcast grade IRD (ex PBS Bitlink ) it appeared to be about
2 seconds slow relative to my house NTP timing. This would about
exactly match what I would expect for uplink encoder, satellite path,
and decoder delays.
I would expect a TV station using that feed might add anywhere
from 1-6 seconds to the delay in their internal processing to OTA... and
a digital cable system might add further delay to that (couple of more
seconds at least).
Real time TV these days is only RELATIVELY real time.
--
Dave Emery N1PRE/AE, die@dieconsulting.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493
"An empty zombie mind with a forlorn barely readable weatherbeaten
'For Rent' sign still vainly flapping outside on the weed encrusted pole - in
celebration of what could have been, but wasn't and is not to be now either."
I was referencing anything to an external, local reference. My comment was
the time difference between the FOX on screen timing and the ball dropping
fireworks. Presumably, the on-screen timing was inserted at their local
control center in NYC, not after satellite hops.
-John
============
On Sun, Jan 01, 2012 at 05:54:46PM -0800, J. Forster wrote:
To me the ball drop/fireworks was different from the on-screen time on
FOX
by a few secnds.
I was watching the media pool HD satellite feed on AMC-1 and
through a broadcast grade IRD (ex PBS Bitlink ) it appeared to be about
2 seconds slow relative to my house NTP timing. This would about
exactly match what I would expect for uplink encoder, satellite path,
and decoder delays.
I would expect a TV station using that feed might add anywhere
from 1-6 seconds to the delay in their internal processing to OTA... and
a digital cable system might add further delay to that (couple of more
seconds at least).
Real time TV these days is only RELATIVELY real time.
--
Dave Emery N1PRE/AE, die@dieconsulting.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass
02493
"An empty zombie mind with a forlorn barely readable weatherbeaten
'For Rent' sign still vainly flapping outside on the weed encrusted pole -
in
celebration of what could have been, but wasn't and is not to be now
either."
On 01/02/2012 06:09 AM, David I. Emery wrote:
On Sun, Jan 01, 2012 at 05:54:46PM -0800, J. Forster wrote:
To me the ball drop/fireworks was different from the on-screen time on FOX
by a few secnds.
I was watching the media pool HD satellite feed on AMC-1 and
through a broadcast grade IRD (ex PBS Bitlink ) it appeared to be about
2 seconds slow relative to my house NTP timing. This would about
exactly match what I would expect for uplink encoder, satellite path,
and decoder delays.
I would expect a TV station using that feed might add anywhere
from 1-6 seconds to the delay in their internal processing to OTA... and
a digital cable system might add further delay to that (couple of more
seconds at least).
Real time TV these days is only RELATIVELY real time.
When doing interviews on live TV across the atlantic, using uncompressed
video and audio have been used to avoid the anoying delays.
But the highly technical world now has more delay than we used to.
Progress... :P
Cheers,
Magnus
On Mon, 02 Jan 2012 06:20:36 +0100, Magnus Danielson
magnus@rubidium.dyndns.org wrote:
On 01/02/2012 06:09 AM, David I. Emery wrote:
On Sun, Jan 01, 2012 at 05:54:46PM -0800, J. Forster wrote:
To me the ball drop/fireworks was different from the on-screen time on FOX
by a few secnds.
I was watching the media pool HD satellite feed on AMC-1 and
through a broadcast grade IRD (ex PBS Bitlink ) it appeared to be about
2 seconds slow relative to my house NTP timing. This would about
exactly match what I would expect for uplink encoder, satellite path,
and decoder delays.
I would expect a TV station using that feed might add anywhere
from 1-6 seconds to the delay in their internal processing to OTA... and
a digital cable system might add further delay to that (couple of more
seconds at least).
Real time TV these days is only RELATIVELY real time.
When doing interviews on live TV across the atlantic, using uncompressed
video and audio have been used to avoid the anoying delays.
But the highly technical world now has more delay than we used to.
Progress... :P
Even 10 years ago when watching live interviews from space, the TV
coverage was significantly delayed compared to the NASA audio feed
which was broadcast over the local amateur repeaters.