Mine is an android. Don’t know if that makes a difference. But the time is set manually afaics
In order for you phone to communicate properly with the cell towers it will get it’s time set by them. You can override it by setting it manually, but by default it’s done automatically. I have an Android too.
OK. I guess I had it set to manual. Let’s see how this plays out over a day or two.
When I was a kid in Northern California, we just dialed POPCORN.
Does that still work?
I found this (there is more detail but copyright stuff so go to the link for more):
Here is a throwback to an earlier era some of you may remember. For decades there was a phone service in Northern California that would read you the time and date if you dialed POP-CORN, the letters that represented 767-2676. That service went dark back in 2007…
The other day my gf asked when the power had gone out, because I was setting the time on the stove and microwave. I explained to her that there was no power failure, I was just fixing the fact that the stove and microwave differed by a minute.
If not for me, all our devices would show flashing zeroes or wrong times.
I’m that guy too.
When I have to reset clocks for day light savings time I stand there with my phone and set each appliance’s time perfectly (near enough). While they will differ a bit over the six months they stay pretty close so the twice a year reset seems to do the job fine for me.
Old school?
I have a Pam clock (vintage advertising)
and when the power goes out (and sometimes just randomly) it starts running backwards. I have to replug it in several times until it starts going the right way.
I yell at it, “Music is reversible but time is not. Turn back! Turn back!” It never listens.
On the University of Colorado campus is (used to be?) a big clock that gets its time from the official NIST atomic clock down the street. In the mid 90s it was fun to set my watch by it. Now that isn’t a big deal, because between ntp, gps, cell towers, and WWV transmissions, it’s easy to know what the time is.
To the OP, I have seen cell towers have the wrong time. It is not common, and I haven’t seen it for a long time, but I do remember back in the dumb phone times occasionally there would be a particular tower that would have the wrong time, and mess up your phone until it connected to a new tower.
Some devices/software will not synchronize the clock if it is off by a large amount. At least some versions of Windows will do this. If, for example, the computer’s internal clock is off by 98 minutes on boot, then Windows may decide not to reset it. This will cause all sorts of problems with https websites and other things. Some versions of Windows may allow force setting the time, but in our enterprise environment that feature was disabled. The fix is to set the bios clock to the correct time (to within a minute or so), and then Windows will use ntp to get it exact.
One of the benefits of having all displays in a Tesla being on a screen is that the clock is set automatically. It even handles time zone.
Time.gov is what I use as well to sync devices. I have several digital cameras I use when working and if I want them set right, I need to sync them at the start of every job, as they will drift away from each other even over a period of a day of two. It’s really annoying.
Cool! My phone time and their time are perfectly synced.
How much do they drift? Does it really matter if they are off by a few seconds? Even my mechanical wrist watch is good to within a few seconds per day (+/- 5 seconds/day advertised but I think mine is fast by about 2 seconds/day).
I have a radio-based atomic clock, synced to the government broadcast. Before a big trip, I snap a photo of the time using both my and my wife’s camera, and then when we upload the pics, I adjust all the meta data to the correct time. That way, pictures we took at the same time are next to each other in iPhoto.
Yes, when I’m switching back and forth between cameras it is disconcerting if they’re off more than a few seconds. I always carry two cameras on me and it messes up the timeline once they drift. It can be fixed — timestamps can be shifted — but it’s easier not having to do that.
Yes, taking a pic of the time.gov screen and doing what you suggest is the other way I sync clocks for a job.
Besides via the radio and telephone, you can sync the time over the Internet.
Or if the op is really cut off, I suppose an almanac and sextant will do the trick.
As a longtime ELO fan: I got that reference!
Or a sundial.
In 2018 I emailed NIST and inquired about time standards. Here is the response I received from one of their physicists:
If you would like a NIST-traceable standard for calibration of a battery-operated clock, there are a few alternatives you might consider. One is a clock or watch that receives WWVB. Another is an ordinary cell phone - presuming that your phone has an app that displays seconds. It’s common practice in cellular telephony to have GPS receivers at the base stations, since the base stations have to be synchronized to a microsecond or better. That’s the time that the base station communicates to the phone. GPS time is traceable to USNO, and NIST and USNO have a memorandum of agreement that our time scales are equivalent to 500 nanoseconds.
So the bottom line for the OP is:
- When you have two devices that need to be manual set/reset to show correct time, and you have one device that is auto-snyced to the world standards, the correct thing to do is to set the manually-set clocks manually.