Junghans Mega 1000 daylight savings Time Question

[jblin]

My Mega Apollo is also receiving the WWVB signal every night. It's synchronizing just fine. I wouldn't call these watches defective. I would call it bad engineering. The watches do what they were built to do however what they were built to do is not correct.

A friend of mine has this Casio watch:

http://www.casio.com/products/Timepiece/Waveceptor/WVA106_Series/product/WVA106HA-9AV/

It did not set to DST on March 11th either.

[rewolf]

I agree with every point collector made.

Today, I wrote an email directly to product manager "Mr. Mega 1000" (see p. 5 in linked pdf), but I don't even know if this person still works for Junghans. We'll have to wait until after the Easter holidays for an answer.

Fourth, The US Congress passed the DST time change law back in 2005, ample time for watch manafactures to code / re-code IF NECESSARY. Any "Atomic" watches sold in late 2006 or 2007 clearly should have had the necessary changes done to them before sale!!!

Honestly, I wouldn't expect that. Even the official NIST "howto" hasn't been corrected yet (as of 2007-04-05), and it was last updated in December 2005, quite probably after the US Congress passed the change. If the NIST doesn't know, how can others outside the US be expected to know?
Anyway, it's certainly not good engineer's practice to hardcode such things that could be made flexible with very little effort - just stupid.

Seventh, If and when, other countries besides the US change the date when DST changes the problem will become larger and believe me you will hear about it!!!

DCF77 is not a problem, because the transmitted time changes from CET to CEST, so there's no necessity for an RC clock to decide whether to add 1h or not - it simply displays what it receives. Maybe one day the UK will decide to use a rule different from the rest of Europe - then they'll have a problem too (but deserved :wink:). The rules for DST end were changed some years ago (from end of September to October) without problems.

The point with WWVB is that it always transmits UTC and is received in many different time zones, so it is not possible to add DST in the time data. The watch has to decide.

AFAIK, Japan (JJY40 and JJY60) has only one time zone and not even DST (yet) - no problems to expect.

EDIT:
Just saw jblin's posting - so there are more RC watch manufacturers with problems...

[jblin]

The point with WWVB is that it always transmits UTC and is received in many different time zones, so it is not possible to add DST in the time data. The watch has to decide.

Sure it is using the DST bit. You set the watch to CST timezone and it knows to subtract 6 hours off the UTC time. When the DST bit is detected it knows to only subtract 5 hours off UTC. When the DST bit is gone it goes back to 6 hours.

http://tf.nist.gov/stations/wwvbtimecode.htm

I think the whole problem with these watches is there really is no timezone setting. You can't select PST, MST, CST or EST. When you set the timezone in the Junghans watch it's a T value which is really the hour. If I set mine to T-04 the hour shows 4:00 on the watch. It's not a +/- value from UTC.

[jblin]

Did any of you get a resolution to this yet?

[rewolf]

No, the email address I wrote to doesn't exist any more. I didn't try any other.

[ronaldheld]

Between the DST hardcoding and the less than stellar synching up, I wonder how long I will be keeping the watch.

[jblin]

I just sent my Mega Apollo back for a refund. I'll start looking for something else. Good luck to the rest of you.

[ronaldheld]

I have owned it before Junghans upgraded the module. At this stage, I could only sell it on a sales forum.

[lars]

Sorry to find this thread so late but better late then never, right?

My Mega 1000 did reflect the early DST change CORRECTLY! That happened even though it did NOT synchronize that night!

Logical conclusion? They have hard coded then new DST change into the module in the latest generation. I will be watching it in the fall to see what it does.

By the way, I had an earlier thread here dealing with another Junghans 1000 issue:

http://dwf.nu/viewtopic.php?t=1230&post ... c&start=15

While my experience with contacting the US distributore was also a complete waste of time - they don't know anything and don't care that they dont - I did reach a helpful person by EMail and phone in Germany.

Give it a try:

Hartmut.Kaiser@junghans.de

He is the marketing manager for this line of watches as I recall and can make things happen. He phoned me from Germany to discuss my US problem! A good man...

Cheers,
Paul