Back in early November I unpacked a big analog-face radio-controlled clock I used to have near the hot tub on the mainland. It’s one of those clocks that synchronizes to radio signals broadcast by the US government on WWV. I was chagrined, at the time, to discover that it only supported “lower 48” US time zones.
It did have a mode to set it manually, but that was only designed to get it set up until it could receive the radio signal and synchronize to the NIST atomic clocks via WWV. Fortunately, I was able to set it manually and its quartz mechanism was good enough that it kept decent time, and we are apparently too far away for it to hear WWV so it stayed set to our local island time. All was good, until…
Apparently, last Friday, due to sunspots and/or ionospheric conditions a stray WWV signal reached the clock. After two months of keeping good time, it is now exactly two hours fast.
I’m thinking of disassembling it and manually moving the hour hand a few hours. The clock will think it’s on Mountain Time (to avoid daylight saving time) but it will read in local time.
—2p