Oh boy, are you gonna be sorry I read this thread. In the Coast Guard I was an Electronics Technician. My specialty was LORAN, Long Range Navigation ground systems. I went through LORAN A school, spent a year at a LORAN A station, came back to the school to teach LORAN A, then transferred over to LORAN C school. In both schools, my subject was LORAN Replacement Equipment. IC chips to replace vacuum tubes. We had a mini-chain set up of all the Timing & Control equipment present at 3 stations. Cause we needed to train more than 1 student at a time and you need more than 1 link to make a chain. The only thing fudged was the transmitter simulator.
LORAN C needs accurate timing. Each station had a Frequency rack that had 3, count’em 3 HP 5061A Cesium Beam Frequency Standards. Primary Passive standards. We’re talking 1+/- 1x10^-11 accuracy. To set the analog clocks on the front panel, to make certain the second hand hit 12 at the same time it did over in Ft Collins, we had to take into account the time it took for the Ft Collins signal to reach us. 6.182 usec / nautical mile.
Years later I picked up an automatic Seiko diver’s watch. After 15 years or so I found it was losing up to 6 minutes a DAY. Now I wear a quartz Seiko diver’s watch that gains 15 seconds every 30 days. I can live with that.
My dumb digital watch ($11 at Walmart) need a minute reset at the DST jumps. Otherwise it’s within a minute, usually close enough. It doesn’t check my health, report/record my location, display weather or news or smut, play audio, or hypnotize cats or rabbits. At least I don’t wind it.
I never wear a watch unless I’m traveling abroad, in which case I buy one at a dollar store and hope the battery lasts until I get home. If it gets me to the airport by check-in time, it’s close enough.
I think it was Andy Rooney who asked what’s the use of a watch accurate to a second a year, if everyone else’s clock is wrong.
I don’t wear a wristwatch any more. I have a cell phone in my pocket with an accurate clock built into it. I sit at a computer all day long with an accurate clock. I spend a lot of time on my computers at night, and they have accurate clocks. Wristwatch? I don’t need no steekin’ wristwatch.
I do have clocks. There’s a clock on the stove that drifts a bit over time. We have an old mechanical clock on the fireplace mantle. The clock on the radio in my truck drifts a bit. They all get reset to the proper time every time we change to and from daylight savings time, and they never drift more than a couple of minutes off between being set. That’s good enough for me.
When I did wear a wristwatch, I used to set it as close as I could (typically to the minute) using either an atomic clock signal broadcast over short wave or later from an atomic clock signal that you could access via the internet. I did not need that level of accuracy and actually didn’t care. I just did it because I could (I’m a geek, what do you expect). As long as it was accurate to within about 5 minutes that would have been good enough for me.
FWIW, I always wore analog watches. I had a digital watch in the 80s, but around the mid 80s I decided I liked old fashioned mechanical watches better.
I have a GPS smartwatch and have become used to time accurate to the second. I have daily exercise “meetings” that I’m often struggling to be on time for. Being able to look at my watch and know that I still have 30 seconds to go to the start of the session while I’m climbing on my indoor bike trainer is useful for me.
I wear a cheapie WalMart watch and if it’s within a minute or two of the actual time, I’m good. Nothing in my life requires to-the-second timing. Retirement means close enough is close enough.
I reset my cheap Wally World watch to the computer time yesterday at 4:28 or thereabouts. Right now, it’s three seconds slow. Should I expect more from a watch that cost less than $8 several years ago?
My Android phone and tablet and Windows 7 and 10 laptops all show different times even though they should reference an online standard. I’ll trust my GPS accuracy but it’s in the car I now drive maybe once a week so it doesn’t help much IRL. I set our kitchen dumb stove and microwave clocks from my cheapo Walmart wristwatch after blackouts. As long as everything is within a couple minutes so we don’t miss medical appointments (assuming THEIR clocks are right) then all is Good Enough.
ISTR in Tracy Kidder’s SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE the account of a DEC designer working on nanosecond timing. He took a break, visited a lib.arts college campus, saw a girl strolling topless, walked into a tree, knocked himself out, and upon recovery resolved to join a country commune and never deal with a unit of time shorter than a season. Moral: Ya gotta keep time in perspective. Which moments REALLY matter?
Pretty accurate. My two Casio watches both run a few seconds fast after a week, so once a week I’ll use the GMT website to reset them.
Somewhat related: About 20 years a ago I worked with an Irishman in Bangkok. I installed something on my work computer that kept its clock synced to atomic time or something like that. For some reason, that really weirded him out. But he had a number of problems anyway. (This was the same Irishman I’ve mentioned before who insisted “Top o’ the mornin’ to you” was NOT, NOT, NOT an Irish expression and would go ballistic whenever he heard it. Needless to say, we were always wishing him, “Top o’ the mornin’ to you, Peter.”)
I cared more when I was catching a train than I do now, but I like to wear a wristwatch.
Yeah, I have all that stuff, too. But when my old watch died, I tried to live with just those for a while, and it drove me bonkers. I’m racing to catch the train, and I don’t want to pull out my cellphone to see if I need to run. I’m interviewing a candidate and I don’t want to pull out my cell phone to check on the time and when I’m supposed to bring him to the next interviewer.
I usually keep my watch to within about a minute of accuracy. I reset it more than twice a year (travel) so I am okay with being off a minute every few months. I have a nice solar-powered citizen (analogue, quartz) that fits the bill very well.
Accurate enough for what, is always the question. Marine chronometers that were good within a minute after a month were a huge deal in the 18th century, but that level of accuracy would hardly cut it for navigation by GPS today.
Fun fact: GPS time is kept by atomic clocks, but it is not set to either International Atomic Time or civil time; it is its own thing. So, if you want to set your watch via GPS, make sure the device is converting to civil time (UTC+time zone) correctly (basically that means the device has a table of leap seconds).
You can (assuming you want to) easily set a watch to the second by stopping it on an exact minute, then pushing the button to start it as soon as the reference clock hits :00 seconds.
As for connecting to the Internet, something is wrong if you cannot then sync the time on your device to within a few milliseconds (RioRico reported such a problem.)
I like it to be accurate so I don’t have to keep adjusting it. Oddly, the most accurate watch I’ve owned is a Timex analog. It’s probably accurate to a few seconds a week. Except I have to change batteries more than I like and it stops when the date changes if it gets too low but will trudge on for months before I change out the battery. I wish it would just die and force me to change the battery.
