NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Batteries for Quartz Watches
From: Bob Trenkamp
Date: 1996 Oct 01, 22:05 EDT
From: Bob Trenkamp
Date: 1996 Oct 01, 22:05 EDT
--- Phil Kohl wrote: The thought is that if one is going to use quartz watches on an extended voyage, one should have spare batteries, the tools and know how needed to replace the batteries, and a time reference for resetting the watch after the battery is replaced. --- end of quoted material --- Phil, There's an alternative: I take several quartz watches and "rate" them - - i.e., I compare their time to a known standard such as WWV by radio or phone several times over the course of a few months. By plotting their error and drawing a visual "best straight line" through the points for each watch, I develop a graph for each watch that permits me, knowing the date, to very accurately convert the time read from the individual watches to GMT. One of these watches is always my Casio barometer watch, but often the others are "$1 each" or "2 for $5" watches I pick up whenever I find them on sale at the checkout counter. The battery on my Casio lasts for several years. Ditto that for the "dollar watches". If I ever had to replace a battery on one of these watches at sea, I'd either reset it to a WWV type signal (available from several sources all over the globe) or I'd use the GMT reading from the other watches to establish the real time. In any event, I'd start by aassuming that the new rate line for the watch would be the same slope as it was before the battery change. Regards, bob ps: if you're running a Mac, and if there's a UNIX server on your internal net somewhere, you can run a neat little app called "Network Time" that lets you synch your Mac clock with the NBS within milliseconds. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This mail list is managed by the majordomo program. To from this list, send the following message to majordomo@XXX.XXX: navigation For help, send the following message to majordomo@XXX.XXX: help Do NOT send administrative requests to navigation@XXX.XXX -ben ------------------------------------------------------------------------