Hi

hate to break it to you, but: *clears throat* neither English **nor** French speakers

I'm surprised the British even allowed French near their time.

CUT or TUC. No. We go with. UTC. why. Who knows?

Politics in a nutshell

Honestly that old Teasmade video is one of my favorite.

Previous time I can recall was also about time synchronization. It's a pattern.

And it's definitely not going to be the last time either 🙃

I understood that reference

@@KHoos I could not find the Easter egg in this episode yet, but I think this is related.

actually they do. Just not by eye ;)

Funny :) Interesting tidbit: turns out the 13th century Vikings had a system for telling the direction of the sun even through cloud cover by using a polarizing crystal.

I like this joke

🤣

How and/or why would it do that? I doubt that it would be legal to transmit such a signal at your location.

@@leocurious9919 likely to keep all the clocks/devices onboard in the timezone of the departure port.

@@uberfuzzy time on board ships and the like drifts gradually through the voyage afaik, so when you get to London from shanghai you aren't like 10 hours jetlagged

How are you getting jetlagged on a 40 day journey? There's no jet involved to introduce any lag.

@@joetoaster447 If everyone aboard kept living by the time of their port of departure they might be many hours out of step with their destination's clocks. As Agustin Venegas pointed out, it's easy to slowly adjust the shipboard clocks during the voyage so that everyone arrives operating on the destination's schedule.

He's just that guy

Best description

Just wait till you find out what questions you didn't know about next week.

That is so true

@@christhildpaschelke4502 that guy who'll make interesting videos.

Best not to tell them that the clocks are set by electromagnetic radiation...

@@gdclemo AAAHH! Radiation! Think of the children!

Well with clocks that is not that odd to think. If you think about it. not that long ago watches with uranium was a thing. (glows)

@@gdclemo no one tell them that we have a run-off fusion reactor 150 million km away showering all of us with electromagnetic radiations for half the day...

@@adarshmohapatra5058 and not just EM radiation, also α and β, too! Not to mention the whole lot of space that's trying to cook us and ruin our radio and analog tv signal with _microwaves_ , just like the ones in the oven!

Nice avatar.

Woah.

It uses only nanoamperes.

I’m sorry mate but your clocks have one purpose, and that’s to tell you the time!

I brought a couple of digital clocks that can be radio-controlled if desired from Europe to the UK. I was quite happy to discover that, as I've been moving around the country, they still always pick up the German signal - even in Northern Ireland (though sometimes it takes a couple of attempts). Thankfully they also have a "correct by X hours" function, so I can see GMT/BST without opening them up and doing weird things to electronics :D

I was wondering if there was some way to adjust or switch which signal they were picking up. Although I guess it has to be hardcoded based on the fact that each transmitter sends data in a completely different format.

I had to do the same with my German clock.

I bought one of these from the UK as well. However Australia is just a bit too far to pick up the signal!

they need a lead shield hehehe

It's actually a conspiracy to get you to work for free.

My school once got one of them for every classroom but somehow they showed the wrong hour, minutes and seconds were always correct but the hours were always wrong like the were in the wrong timezone or something like that. If you tried to change it to the right time the clock changed it self back to whatever wrong hour it used to be. In our complete school were just wrong clocks.

@@jwider96 we’re you on the south coast? Might have been getting French time more clearly than uk signals…

@@jwider96 Most Radio-Controlled clocks have a switch to set for the time-service of the (nearest) country you're in - UK, Germany (Central European Time), USA or Japan - maybe the school's clocks were set for Germany/CET? (You'd probably get the German time signal in most of the UK).

The British parliament could stop existing and nothing bad would happen for months, the NPL stops existing and the concept of time ceases to exist.

This was invented in the US in 1948 and has been used here for decades...

@@ErikUden OMG then how would we know the length of a piece of string As NPL was the master reference model.

@@FJB2020 ok?

@@mojoich2736 You'd have to *Shudders* Ask the French. *Dramatic brass ensemble* They're the keepers of metric units.

Honestly! It's kinda cool to think about clocks setting themselves, that too by radio; I wish we had these in the U.S. tbh 😞

@@prayagsuthar9856 We do. The transmitter is in Colorado, with call sign "WWVB", and it's run by the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST). Every Wal-Mart I've ever been in has had clocks that will sync to this signal.

Got a clock at home that did that for many years until the battery stopped recharging.

If you think about it, everything is done in real time.

@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 they mean that at the begging the clock shows 10:40, by the end of the 5 min video it shows 10:45. Tom has done his segments with specific gaps for the interviews so the clock keeps time with the video

@@jsworpin If you look carefully, its not in synch with the time on the video. It jumps forwards and backwards

@@jsworpin It seems to be off by 2 seconds. At the beginning, the clock was behind by 5 seconds ( video timestamp was 0:09 and clock said 10:40:04 ) At the end of the video, the timestamp was 4:49 and the clock said 10:44:46 , approximately.

@@jasonrubik 2 seconds isn't bad at all. :)

Why is the weather data encrypted?

@@640kareenough6 Short answer: Because of the money. The weather data transmission isn't operated by the PTB but by a private company that sells licences for the decrypting data technology.

France overlayers their signal on an AM radio broadcast at 162 kHz, the Russians use 66.6 kHz, and the Japanese 40 and 80 kHz. I forget which the Chinese use, but if you have a GPS disciplined oscillator you can coherently integrate their carriers and pull them all out of the noise floor from Europe, though bit decoding can only be done with the local ones.

They use a speed of 1 bit/sec !

@@RN1441 The radio station on 162kHz went silent some years ago but the frequency is still active just to carry the phase modulated time/data signal.

The UK has daylight saving time too. There's GMT (Greenwich Mean Time, which is also UTC) and BST (British Summer Time which is UTC+1)

DCF77 (the german time transmitter) has two bits to encode if it is DST or not (so no need to set it) and a third bit that will announce the switchover from DST to normal time or vice versa, so the clock can switch even if it isn't receiving at the second the switch is made. Most consumer clocks don't sync constantly, but use a regular quartz clock for the time in between, which is "good enough" for a normal clock showing only whole seconds. There's even a leap second announcement bit... From what I can see, the MFS format used in Britain has about the same features.

Trump wanted to get rid of the American transmitter to save money. I guess it's safe now....

@@TJ-up8vj America's problem is that different states have different timezones and rules for DST. For example some states have daylight saving time, but some do not. Britain has DST, but it has only one timezone and one rule for DST. Not so for the US, so the equipment must be much more complex.

At the tone, 12 hours, one minute, coordinated universal time.

The time dilation effects of gravity also have to be taken in to account when designing satellites. The on-board clocks of GPS satellites, for example, are designed to tick at a slightly slower rate than ground-level clocks, because the passage of time for an object appears to speed up as it moves farther away from a massive object.

@@jacksonlarson6099 as far as I know they even coded a switch, so they can take Einstein in account or not. The reason was, that his theory wasn't really proven when GPS was designed

Does that mean we can find out what speed is absolute 0mph in deep/inter-galactic space by comparing the speed of time at various vectors?

@@C.I... assuming you mean completely flat spacetime with no gravitational time dilation, even intergalactic space has some of it going on due to the gravitationally-bound “local group”. As far as we know, there’s no place in the universe with a total absence of gravitational waves

I think they did something similar with the Apollo flights - onboard clocks were behind the earthbound ones when they got home.

Dr*

Can confirm. Am near London and have two clocks synced from DCF77 at home.

Yep, in Slovakia with 3 clocks. Altough In some corners or rooms, the clocks gets properly synced only in night. Otherwise they just stay at 00:00. I guess there is less interference at night.

I think I saw clocks that receive DCF77 for sale in one of the German based discount supermarkets here in London last week. But I didn't buy it because I couldn't work out how it dealt with timezones and daylight save time. There didn't seem to be anywhere on it to tell it what timezone you wanted.

@@charliedobbie8916 When they made the bright idea to move the transmitter from Rugby to Anthorn a lot of the South UK had (still has?) to use DCF as the signal did not reach.

Has the British equivalent a lower range than DCF77? That is quite surprising to me since it is using a somewhat similar frequency.

That is a GREAT feature! A fall for an older person can be very dangerous.

Do you still have to change the battery, or is it wired or solar?

@@TheQuark6789 I have changed it when visiting, just to be on the safe side.

Love that system, I can pick up Hawaii and Colorado on 10mhz on my hf rig

@@greg2092 I really like that they have a phone number you can call and listen in. Shame it autodisconnects after 5 or 10 minutes

The instructions for my clock have a suggestion for when it has trouble receiving the signal inside a building: "Take the clock outside and point the back of the clock in the general direction of Fort Collins, Colorado."

@@tvdan1043 Seems reasonable. As long as you know which way Colorado is from you

@@thomasvlaskampiii6850 If you don't, knowing the current time might not be the highest priority.

Hehe we have saying in Germany: Only a broken clock is right twice a day.

Schools full of clocks usually have a controller on location.

@@DoctorWhom Yup, there's a central clock somewhere (usually a panel in the school office), wired to remote clock faces in every room. The remote faces are electric clocks running off synchronous motors, that turn with the power line frequency -- evidenced by the second hand turning constantly rather than ticking along. It was kinda cool to see those clock faces re-synchronize, too. They would all stop for about a minute, then suddenly advance one minute and start turning normally again. Though my high school temporarily replaced most of the remote faces with regular battery-powered quartz clocks. The central clock had no battery backup for power cuts -- and the power was being shut off multiple times (outside of school hours) while the school was being added onto and remodeled. ...Which led to the system being hours off from the actual time until construction was complete. It was a couple years _after_ construction had finished before they finally got around to putting all the old clocks back, though.

@@AaronOfMpls in our school, they were just like Tom's.

We've got a bunch of these radio synced clocks at work. Shame no-one checked to see if they'd be able to pick up any reception where they were placed...!

I guess you have never been camping that the sea side.

can you produce more nickel please? the world is having a shortage of nickel currently

we all have the same reflex, which is amazing

@@ironicjason257 Unfortunately, melting a coin for its metal carries a 5-year prison sentence. Though you can probably avoid that by melting outside the US.

Is that a Doofenschmirtz reference? If it is, I'm so proud of you

isn't it in Boulder, at NIST?

@@valkyrie_pilot Perhaps it is now. I believe I was told it was in Denver, years ago. But what you say makes sense because USAF has a large presence in Boulder. For instance, the Air Force Academy is in Boulder. Anyway your presentation was excellent. And my second point is that the EXACT time adjusted around the globe is critical for TOP SECRET communications. So, today, exact time is more critical than it was 20-30 years back when this plan was hatched.

@@MrMockingbird1313 The Air Force Academy is in Colorado Springs, about an hour south of Denver (Boulder is a half hour northwest). The time standard, at least currently, is in Boulder, I had an internship there a few years ago (the time-standard atomic clock itself is sort of anti-climactic, looks like a server farm). That time-standard sends a signal to an antenna array similar to the one in this video located north of Fort Collins.

@@quillmaurer6563 Your information is more current and accurate. But, my information goes back 20 years. I just remember vividly that secure transfer of information depends on an accurate time standard and the transmitter was 4000/second west of here. Funny stuff? Thanks for your correction.

The signal is also encoded into BBC Radio 4 LW Transmission.

As a dumbass American, could you please elaborate on why it's fun to watch when the hour changes? Is that when it syncs up or something?

@@emmanotsostrong At least the ones I’ve seen and from what I remember (it’s been a while) the hands whizz round and round for a bit until they settle on the new time

@@emmanotsostrong They're not usually digital clocks - they're analogue. So they tick away as normal but then daylight savings changes and the hands spring into action and whirl around until they settle on the new correct time. It's something quite unexpected to see from something that's usually just a crystal oscillator and and bunch of plastic cogs.

The only good thing about daylight savings is the way the clock goes 'round.

Not enough work tidying up all those cables, though. Yikes...

I have a Lidl LCD lounge clock - time, date, moonphase, temp. one slide switch to change from UK to Germany timezone. ~£15 in the bargain bin and I've had it for years.

Needed a new battery.

"and so we beat on, clocks against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past..."

*caesium-137ly

I think it's actually the title of the original draft of Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay.

All signs exist for a reason. You just know someone dropped a pen behind there and unplugged the entirety of Britain from time trying to reach back and pick it up

I paused 49 seconds into the video due to the, OMG CABLE MANGEMENT IS A THING!, issue. I think anyone who has worked in IT in almost any capacity would have a similar reaction.

@@jjosua probably no one wants to arrange the down time in case it doesn't come back up again

It's meticulously organised that way, because if they move the cables, it might change the official time by half a nanosecond.

@@DaedalusYoung don't want to add extra length to the cables, it could set us back thousands of years

After the scene with these messy wires I can't focus on the topic anymore. I just keep thinking how is it possible that such a big and important organisation can't make cables right!

Mine is over 15 years old and is still going strong on its original battery, because it's solar powered.

Not even close to the best watch ever made, but very accurate.

@@Jabber-ig3iw A watches purpose is to tell the time and do so accurately, if it can fulfil those functions reliably for vast periods of time then it works, there is no "best" about anything here if the watch fulfils its main purpose. That is of course unless you are getting into the inane world of watch snobbery that cares more about brands and percieved value than anything tangible.

Ha! That's funny! Cause my kitchen electronic clock did not survive dropping it. The antenna inside wasn't attached strongly enough and it snapped with a wire. Didn't know that until the clock started drifting by a minute or two. Then I opened it, soldered and secured the antenna back in place. Works like a charm ever since. And it just recently switched itself to summer time too.

@@ragnkja The time signal (MSF) itself does have a summer time flag, but I guess the clock didn't honor that.

My analogue one would adjust itself. Most fun when the clocks went back but it could only go forward so it spun around until it skipped 23 hours.

@@ragnkja it'll stay accurate for as long as the battery can deliver enough power to move the mechanics fast enough.

You’d be lucky if an alarm clock made today lasted 3 years. The times have changed.

I listen to BBC World Service via SiriusXM satellite radio. The top of the hour beeps are noticably late, due to network latency. As much as 18s late (!!), the one time that I actually checked it.

Time has stood still in Australia.

Does it have GPS to get the time zone?

@@Motorman2112 Search for Atomic watch. I think watches capable of time syncing use 60KHz from WWV in US. Don't know what the standard is for other countries.

Even some Casio's have this tech ..

@@Joetechlincolns You still need the time zone. This requires your location to at least a reasonable level (or effectively so).

To really put it to the test, cross the border to or from the west of China in a north or south direction.

My watch is radio controlled & yes Atomic timing is normal.

Yes they are. Had a watch on my wrist for years that could do it. I've never visited the UK - only been around Europe a bit and it always worked :)

There are transmitters in Germany, Japan, China and the US (and possibly elsewhere)

Yes. In the US there is an atomic clock in Fort Collins, Colorado.

We in Germany have that too

Wikipedia has all the details. See also NPL's website.

I feel called out. ;-) :D

A catch is that time signals go beyond the country borders, so there are a lot more countries where radio-controlled clocks are a thing. For example South Korea has its own time signal (HLA) but the Japanese time signal (JJY) is more frequently used because you can receive JJY from SK just fine.

Also China

They specifically picked that location as a backdrop. Goodness only knows what the less aesthetic cabling looks like...

f

Adventure Time

Ah, so that's what's happening to the clocks at our school!

Main voltage clocks are more the accurate enough for a school. The grid frequency (at least in europe and the UK) is adjusted so these clocks keep accurate to within seconds. They need to be set once ofcourse, but after that they will keep their time forever, as long as the grid keeps it 50Hz fairly accurate. Now, my school just has quartz battery clocks, and for some reason they seem never to be right, and constantly need battery changes.

@@slome815 Well, you would still need to account for DST right? And if you imagine a building with 100 clocks, that gets annoying...

@@igorrinkovec6405 Yes, you still have to account for DST. It's not that much work if everyone just changes the time in their own desk / part of the building. At least you don't have to change batteries. Where I work it seems I'm the only one that changes batteries on dead clocks.

@@slome815 The traditional system is to have "slave" clocks which accept advance and reset signals from the master clock. You only need to set the time on the master unit and then every other clock in the building will set itself from that.

Their are atomic clocks small enough to fit inside your laptop now. Conversely look up Cesium Fountain Clock for something more from your imagination that is bleeding edge.

atomic clocks just have one really big atom inside for increased accuracy

Funny enough the transmission towers are very close to the 50°N 9°E point - which is in a nearby forest, maybe about a kilometer away.