On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:04:51 +0000, Basil Jet
wrote:

On 2012\02\08 23:05, Charles Ellson wrote:
On Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:42:04 +0000, Basil Jet
wrote:

On 2012\02\08 09:50, Bruce wrote:
Basil wrote:
On 2012\02\07 22:13, Bruce wrote:
Basil wrote:

On 2012\02\07 19:41, Star Fury wrote:

I wonder what the source of the authoritative time for the UK Railway
actually is, now?

At least one railway company gave its staff Eurochron radio controlled
watches which got their signal from Mainflingen, Germany.


Surely from the atomic clocks at Anthorn, Cumbria?

I don't think Eurochron (Junghans) ever produced a watch which received
the British time signal, BICBW.

They make at least one wall clock (364/7003.00) which uses DCF and MSF
but Google chucks up some remnants of currently unreachable forum
posts suggesting that some of their wris****ches already had bother
with confusion between German and US transmitters (presumably where
neither had an effectively dominant signal) so MSF might have made
things even worse.

You seem to be suggesting that Eurochron choosing to make a watch which
received the British time signal would have damaged the reception
abilities of their existing products.

The difference probably lies with the usage of the items. A clock can
be expected to remain in a fixed location and an expectation of
remaining in the country in which it has been sold (with IME a
standard warning that more than one position might need to be tried)
while a watch will be much more liable to be moved around (and high up
at high speed occasionally) causing more unpredictable reception. In
the case of the clock, any users "in the middle" are likely to cure
the problem just by changing the position but a watch is constantly
mobile (like a mobile phone without a dominant base station) and three
marginal transmitters will be more fun than just two.

For the record, the USA and British broadcasts are the ones that can
interfere with each other under rare weather conditions if you're in
Newfoundland or thereabouts. They are both on 60 kHz, but use different
encoding sequences so interference prevents comprehension of either
signal. The German signal is on 77.5kHz.