What is an Atomic Watch?
An atomic watch is a wristwatch that is radio controlled to keep the most accurate time on earth. You never need to set the time or date of an atomic watch because it receives a low-frequency radio signal nightly that keeps it in perfect synchronization with the U.S. Atomic Clock in Colorado. An atomic watch is handy because it automatically adjusts for Daylight Saving Time (DST), leap years and even leap seconds. It contains an internal antenna and program that is set to search once a day for the 60 Hz radio signal emitted from the WWVB transmitter in Ft. Collins. When it finds the signal it decodes the time then sets itself. The Ft. Collins transmitter has a radius of 1864 miles (3000km), making it available to the most of the United States with the exception of Hawaii and Alaska. An atomic watch has a different mode setting for each time zone. When the watch receives the radio signal from the atomic clock, it also reads its internal program that stores the time zone setting. It then
An atomic watch is a wristwatch that is radio controlled to keep the most accurate time on earth. You never need to set the time or date of an atomic watch because it receives a low-frequency radio signal nightly that keeps it in perfect synchronization with the U.S. Atomic Clock in Colorado. An atomic watch is handy because it automatically adjusts for Daylight Saving Time (DST), often mispronounced as Daylight Savings Time, leap years and even leap seconds. It contains an internal antenna and program that is set to search once a day for the 60 Hz radio signal emitted from the WWVB transmitter in Ft. Collins. When it finds the signal it decodes the time then sets itself. The Ft. Collins transmitter has a radius of 1864 miles (3000km), making it available to the most of the United States with the exception of Hawaii and Alaska. If you travel overseas with an atomic watch, it will continue to function as a quartz watch but will not receive radio controlled updates. Although Europe has i
In a nutshell, an Atomic Watch is any wristwatch that uses a special radio signal to synch up with a government maintained atomic clock. Some manufacturers also call this a Radio Controlled watch. Either way, you end up with a highly accurate watch. For the last handful of years manufacturers have been offering small clocks that can receive and interpret the radio signal sent from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Fort Collins, Colorado. NIST broadcasts at 60,000 cycles per second (Hz) and the radio station has the call letters of WWVB. This signal reaches the majority of the contiguous 48 United States and huge portions of Canada and Mexico. Today the electronics for doing this job have become small enough to be packaged in a wristwatch. And Casio is a key manufacturer who has embraced this technology and now offers a variety of watches that utilize this signal to set and maintain highly accurate time. Note: there are atomic clocks located around the world that hav
Atomic watches, more accurately called radio controlled watches, are the most accurate wrist watches in the world. It is estimated that an atomic watch will lose less than one second, over the course of three million years. By receiving a radio signal that contains the time and date code from one of the atomic clocks that keep the world’s time, an atomic watch automatically calibrates itself to the exact time. They self-adjust for Daylight Saving Time, leap years, and even leap seconds.
