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The CTT clock

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  • Member since
    December 2001
  • From: Austin, TX
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The CTT clock
Posted by lionelsoni on Wednesday, May 4, 2005 3:50 PM
I just noticed this: "All times are GMT -6 hours. The time is now 3:42:48 PM". The time agrees with my watch. I am in the central time zone. We are observing daylight saving time. But that is -5 hours, not -6.

By the way, GMT (Greenwich mean time) is long gone. It's now called UTC (coordinated universal time).

Bob Nelson

  • Member since
    August 2003
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Posted by FJ and G on Wednesday, May 4, 2005 7:09 PM
Bob,

THe reason I know about GMT and UTC is because when I was a kid I built a 3 tube and a 5 tube regenerative and superheterodyne Short wave radio and used to tune in a lot to the BBC in London and every hour they'd chime GMT. Had a 50 foot wire running thru the house and used to stay up all night listening to different continents and countries and QSL them.

That's the pre-computer Geek era.

  • Member since
    July 2003
  • From: Wisconsin
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Posted by Bob Keller on Thursday, May 5, 2005 7:00 AM
To quote the group "Chicago" "Does anybody really know what time it is?"[:D]

And GMT vs Universal, what can I say, we're all Anglophiles here ...

I'll ask Fire Team Bergstrom to look into it.

Bob Keller

  • Member since
    December 2001
  • From: Austin, TX
  • 10,096 posts
Posted by lionelsoni on Thursday, May 5, 2005 8:52 AM
Bob, the real problem is that the note, "All times are GMT -6 hours.", is wrong. Since you apparently adjusted for daylight saving time, all times are actually -5 hours, because GMT was not affected by daylight saving.

The UTC vs. GMT thing is just a matter of obsolete terminology. If GMT were still being used, it would be within a second or so of UTC. UTC is one of several kinds of "universal time" that are now defined in slightly different ways for various purposes. UTC has constant-length SI (metric) seconds and is occasionally adjusted by the IERS (International Earth Rotation Service--I love that name!) and the BIH (Bureau International de l'Heure) by inserting "leap seconds" to keep it approximately in sync with the earth's rotation. UTC is the time that the United States' and other countries' civil time is based on.

Bob Nelson

  • Member since
    July 2003
  • From: Crystal Lake, IL
  • 8,059 posts
Posted by cnw1995 on Thursday, May 5, 2005 4:23 PM
Wow, this is interesting. (Step aside ma'am, I'm from the International Earth Rotation Service...) I have one of those short-wave radios - nothing like listening to Radio Bulgaria or Radio Moscow's English language service...while running the trains.

Doug Murphy 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers...' Henry V.

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