Radio Clock - Daylight Saving Time

Daylight Saving Time

Very often radio clocks have bugs in their software relating to daylight saving time (DST). This often leads to clocks not updating themselves to the correct civil local time when DST transitions on to off or off to on. Clocks that interpret longwave stations tend to be the most affected due to very minimal low level software (often hand coded assembler, or compiled C) used to decode and display the time signal.

On some systems, notably WWVB, DST is much less an issue because part of the transmitted timecode contains a "DST is now in effect" flag. Therefore even if a change in law occurs which changes the transition days (the most common change), the transmitted timecode will be updated and the clock's software only needs to pay attention to this DST flag. The only change which would typically cause DST transition problems would be if the transition time were to change (e.g. 0200 hours local time).

Read more about this topic:  Radio Clock

Famous quotes containing the words daylight, saving and/or time:

    Know how to live within yourself: there is in your soul a whole world of mysterious and enchanted thoughts; they will be drowned by the noise without; daylight will drive them away: listen to their singing and be silent.
    Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–1873)

    Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might.
    Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)

    There is something even in the lapse of time by which time recovers itself.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)