Just bought the GWM 5610U-1C. It was a tough decision choosing between the DW5600 and this, ended up choosing this because the atomic time keeping is cool.
However, I’m a tad annoyed that the time doesn’t perfectly match with time.gov and time.is since the atomic sync doesn’t account for time propagation, so there’s like a fraction of a second delay that’s noticeable. Other than that, the watch is fantastic and has most features I would want. (I wish it had barometer and altimeter stuff, maybe even compass, and dive rated so I can press buttons underwater)
Unless time.whateverthefuck is running their own cesium clocks, which I doubt. The gshock should be more accurate when synced. 60khz radio waves sent by NIST travel at the speed of light. That is standard em radio propagation. Your computer meanwhile theoretically does, it runs through God knows many nodes, bounced around until it finally gets back to you. I guess they could try to establish your location and correct, but eh…
Now let’s talk about why your watch can’t transmit. Well it could, but you’d need to carry around a giant antenna and a few kilowatts worth of rms power generation to even be heard over normal background noise at any reasonable distance. The wwvb towers in Denver host an antenna that is electrically one quarter wavelength (1250meters) but obviously not actually that long because that’s 10x the towers. They use a series of coils and stretch horizontally to make up for the rest. They power this antenna 24/7 at 70kw. Part of the reason it’s in Denver is central location to the country for best average timekeeping. Height above ground also rules when it comes to radio waves.
Im not going to go into the code that’s actually transmitted because even as a HAM operator I don’t know it all myself, but just know that it uses a system of 1s and 0s by pulsing the carrier wave to tell ever clock that’s listening “it will be 2:35pm in… 3…2…1…NOW”. Feel free to watch this much less baked youtuber explain.
The reason your watch will always be off by the speed of light at best is the radio station doesn’t know where every single person is and can’t send out 300,000 signals to tell each one what their specific time is.
Let’s gloss over the fact that by the time the light gets from the screen to your eyes, it’s TECHNICALLY wrong anyways…
If your interested check out NIST and WWVB website. Thats actually one of the things that got me interested in radio. side note I always wear a radio controlled casio. Sometimes a g. Mostly a field style lcw m100.