Watches in the 21st Century

[MRC01]

Aspen on a yacht?

...

Good thing that's an aircraft carrier, cuz you gotta be able to fly in.

 

[pseudoid]

Aspen on a yacht?
View attachment 181824

Another typical "Mountain and the Muhamed" dilemma, resolved.

 

[Prana Ferox]

Aspen on a yacht?

View attachment 181824

I heard the Brit carriers used ski jumps but this is ridiculous

 

[pseudoid]

Brit carriers used

As I recall, Brits were more famous for making aluminum hulls that can actually catch fire... Falkland Islands was the objective test results.

 

[Raindog123]

Young guys with good reflexes, they could get it within about a tenth of a second which was sufficient. BOOM! satellites all came in like magic.

…and GPS timing, with a good number of satellites in view and in a coherent (phase lock) state can give 1e-9 sec timing (1PPS) accuracy.

 

[MRC01]

Sure, but when you're out at sea, you do what you can with what you have.

 

[danadam]

…and GPS timing, with a good number of satellites in view and in a coherent state can give 1e-9 sec timing (1PPS) accuracy.

On the subject of GPS, pretty cool introduction: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/

 

[Raindog123]

Sure, but when you're out at sea, you do what you can with what you have.

Absolutely. With the only difference, when you’re on land they are called “urban legends” while at sea they are ”fisherman’s tales”.

The entire carrier (and all its aircraft) not having a time-accurate system with a user display… that one can synchronize their wrist-watch to and ’hand carry’ over to that poor computer… Not to mention, with that 5-10sec/day drift, how did not it happen (and got noticed/resolved) much earlier?

 

[MRC01]

Absolutely. With the only difference, when you’re on land they are called “urban legends” while at sea they are ”fisherman’s tales”.

The entire carrier (and all its aircraft) not having a time-accurate system with a user display… that one can synchronize their wrist-watch to and ’hand carry’ over to that poor computer… Not to mention, with that 5-10sec/day drift, how did not it happen (and got noticed/resolved) much earlier?

I have no doubt that they had exact satellite time in other places on that ship where they needed it. But we had no easy or automatic way to get it in the met lab. So we got resourceful and created our own method to get it. This was a new system undergoing "op-eval" or operational evaluation. That clock drift and lack of sync was an oversight in the system requirements.

 

[pseudoid]

On the subject of GPS,...

Monkey See; Monkey Do!
Glasnost was a Russian BFD but it got nudged over when on 27 December 2018, BeiDou Navigation Satellite System started providing global services. The 35th and the final satellite of BDS-3 was launched into orbit on 23 June 2020. It was said in 2016 that BeiDou-3 will reach millimeter-level accuracy (with post-processing). Yeah, we need to send a copy to @amirm to determine that claim, in a more 'objective' manner.

 

[Ron Texas]

I was thinking of keeping the yacht in the Bahamas but registered in Panama. Not enough water in Aspen for much more than a rubber duckie.

 

[Raindog123]

Glasnost was a Russian BFD

“Glasnost” or “Glonass”?

(and what is “BFD”?)

 

[Imran Zafar]

My recent acquisition: A perfectly useless morning

 

[pseudoid]

“Glasnost” or “Glonass”?

(and what is “BFD”?)

Yes! My bad!
But not that BFD of a faux-pas!
Edit/ADD: The Kremlin warned it could blow up 32 GPS satellites with its new anti-satellite technology, ASAT, which it tested Nov. 15 2021 on a retired Soviet Tselina-D satellite, according to numerous news reports.

 

[rdenney]

With some movements (like the 9015), the spec is very broad and you can do much better if you take the time to fine tune it. Since it's a relatively cheap mass produced movement the factory can't justify that effort for the price. But for a hobbyist, why not? It's fun. The 9015 is kind of a sweet spot; the even cheaper Seiko 7S26 (as in the Seiko 5 models) is not as consistent.


Part of the fun for this mechanical watch enthusiast is opening them up to see how they "tick", appreciate the engineering that goes into them, and hands-on exploring how much better than specification (or not!) I can get them to run.

You’ll enjoy reading this old article by Walt Odets on performing adjustments on an IWC, and how that differs from regulation.

Tweaking the Mark XII: Part 2.1

TWEAKING THE MARK XII: PART 2.1 THE CONCEPT OF TIMING by Walt Odets Having switched the original Mark XII caliber 884 for a caliber 887 (see “Tweaking the Mark XII: Part 1“), I spent in excess of 50 hours tweaking the escapement of the 887 to see if I could...

www.timezone.com

Yes, it can be done on a 9015, but at what cost?

Rick “much more to it than nudging the regulator plate” Denney

 

[pseudoid]

regulator plate

isn't that an Italian pasta dish

 

[rdenney]

Of course. But cheap movements (like the Seiko 7S26) cannot achieve perfect beat across all positions. You can only perfect it in 1 position then it changes in others. The movement just isn't made to a high enough degree of precision. Higher quality movements can achieve 0 beat across all positions. But they don't have to be expensive or fancy, for example the 9015.

Bear error is not what causes changes in timing with position. Changes in timing are usually caused by imperfect symmetry in the hairspring, imperfect alignment of the regulator pins on the regulator cock, improper hairspring alignment in the collet, mis-positioned pallet jewels, balance staff end shake or asymmetry, or even bits of dried oil on the balance jewels. Beat error is caused by the hairspring not being aligned to deflect symmetrically around the pallet fork release points. What causes that can also cause timing errors.

Rick “cause and effect” Denney

 

[rdenney]

@rdenney

Rick if I owned a Patek Phillippe Denny

Hey buddy let's think really big. How about if I was a billionaire, had a house in Aspen and a 150' yacht?

Well, that is indeed the target market for the Big Three—fundamental wealth not just a good-paying job.

If I was to buy a watch from the Big Three, however, Vacheron Constantin would be more likely to get my business. I’m not a fan of the Nautilus but I love the Overseas.

Rick “but that’s waaaay over my personal spend threshold, even when feeling flush” Denney

 

[rdenney]

Something like 30 years ago, I worked for SAIC and got sent to visit an aircraft carrier to fix a weather acquisition and analysis system. It received polar orbiting satellite data with a SMQ-11, which has a rotating antenna that points to the satellite as it tracks across the sky (about 15 mins horizon to horizon). But they hadn't captured a satellite pass for a week, which is why they flew me out there.

Long story short, it turned out to be a clock problem. Due to the satellite's orbit altitude and speed, every 1 second of clock error is about 6 miles of distance when you align each raw data pixel to Earth. That's a lot but this was for weather, so it didn't have to be perfect. But if the clock was off much more than that you miss the data entirely. The computer that drove the SMQ-11 was produced by the lowest bidder (haha) and its clock drifted about 5-10 seconds per day. We had to find an absolute reference for the clock, which was surprisingly difficult out in the middle of the ocean.

Flash back to a few months earlier, my neighbor had given me an old Zenith shortwave radio and I had been having fun exploring the dial at night. Completely by accident I discovered time broadcast at 5, 10, 15 MHz. You know, "at the tone, US Naval Observatory Master clock will be ... BEEP". Flash back to the ship, on a long shot, I asked the guys in the meteorology lab (an ET and AG if any Navy guys are reading) if they had a shortwave radio. They start digging around the equipment racks and found one that had been provisioned with the ship but nobody had ever used. We plugged it in rigged up an antenna and it worked! I tuned it to 10 MHz and showed them how to get a Unix command prompt on the computer that drove the satellite antenna, use the "date" command to set the clock and hit ENTER exactly when the tone beeped. Young guys with good reflexes, they could get it within about a tenth of a second which was sufficient. BOOM! satellites all came in like magic.

Cool story. I’ve been getting time from WWV for 50 years. But it is NIST that runs WWV on those frequencies, from their atomic clock in Colorado. The Naval Observatory atomic clock is in Washington.

“At the tone, the time will be 4 hours and 10 minutes, Coordinated Universal Time…Beeep!”

Rick “broadcasts at 60 KHz for submarines” Denney

 

[MRC01]

You’ll enjoy reading this old article by Walt Odets on performing adjustments on an IWC, and how that differs from regulation.

Tweaking the Mark XII: Part 2.1

TWEAKING THE MARK XII: PART 2.1 THE CONCEPT OF TIMING by Walt Odets Having switched the original Mark XII caliber 884 for a caliber 887 (see “Tweaking the Mark XII: Part 1“), I spent in excess of 50 hours tweaking the escapement of the 887 to see if I could...

www.timezone.com

Yes, it can be done on a 9015, but at what cost? ...

Yes, I did enjoy that, especially part 3.