Fall for Recorder Clock

[UnknownVT]

anyone else Fall for the recorder clock this last Sunday Oct/28/2007?

My SV2000 WV10D6 DVD Recorder from WalMart recorded a program one hour late.

On investigating I found the recorder's clock had been set back an hour -
most likely because I had set DST.

This also happened on my VCR.

Of course, according to my calender the clocks don't go back until next Sunday - Nov/4/2007.

I reset the clock(s) manually back to the correct time, and turned DST off.

Then I had a double-whammy -
I decided that it was probably safer to have the DVD recorder clock set by the PBS broadcast time -
so I set the clock for AutoSet by my local PBS channel -

Yesterday Monday Oct/29 - I found another program was recorded one hour late -
this time it seems that the PBS time had also been set back an hour one week early.
(FWIW- the network time via my DSL is correct - and has not been set back yet).

I think I'll just have the clock time set manually.

[UnknownVT]

anyone else Fall for the recorder clock this last Sunday Oct/28/2007?

Answering my own question....

DST in the USA has changed for 2007 -

please see this page

This would also explain why my VCR was wrong back in Spring.

[redwudz]

Just about every device that uses the 'old' daylight savings dates will be wrong. November 4, they will be right again, so I'll probably just wait. Of course there are a few states like Arizona that never adopted daylight savings.

[UnknownVT]

FWIW - What I've learnt -

older equipment - like VCRs - DST setting is most likely a pre-programmed calender using the old DST rules - ie: first Sunday in April and last Sunday in October. So these will NEVER be correct again - so should be turned OFF, and the time adjusted manually.

Some equipment can set the clock using PBS station time signals - how these are done seem to vary.
This year due to the new DST rules - some PBS stations seem to have the correct time, and some seem to have prematurely set the clocks back 1 hour (probably still conforming to the old DST rules).

There was no reliable way of determining beforehand whether any station was going to be broadcasting the correct time until AFTER the event.

Hopefully the PBS signals will be reliable in the future when the new DST rules have been firmly established -
in the meantime it seems that setting time manually (with DST off) is the safest way (at least for me - since my PBS station had the wrong time on Sunday and Monday - corrected the time on Tuesday - then somehow went back to the incorrect time again! )

[GideonK]

some PBS stations seem to have the correct time

Mine doesn't (New york), I was wandering who can we contact to voice/e-mail our displeasure?

[jman98]

For what it's worth, the decision to change DST for the next few years (it's not just 2007 but I think through either 2010 or 2011) was made in 2006. It was poorly publicized. I knew about it because one of my jobs at work was to make sure that our servers were patched so that they would correctly change their clocks 2 weeks earlier than normal and 1 week later than normal.

GideonK - I wouldn't worry about it. By Sunday the clocks will be right and you're extremely unlikely to be able to contact anyone who will have any idea how to fix the problem. PBS people aren't exactly highly paid and I wouldn't expect a lot of technical expertise there as a result.

[usually_quiet]

I usually have the clocks for my recording devices set to automatic, and they use the signal from the local PBS station to set the time and date. This year the time and date has been screwed up several times, for days on end, including now. For a while I even seemed to be getting the time based on GMT rather than EDT or EST. Sometimes there is no time-date stamp in the signal at all. I keep having to set the time to manual, and if there is a brown-out or power outage (also frequent) the time is wrong again. My local PBS station spent a bundle on Hi-Def equipment, but I sure wish they would train someone to set the time-date portion of their cable signal correctly and check it once in a while.

[wabjxo]

I usually have the clocks for my recording devices set to automatic, and they use the signal from the local PBS station to set the time and date. This year the time and date has been screwed up several times, for days on end, including now. For a while I even seemed to be getting the time based on GMT rather than EDT or EST. Sometimes there is no time-date stamp in the signal at all. I keep having to set the time to manual, and if there is a brown-out or power outage (also frequent) the time is wrong again. My local PBS station spent a bundle on Hi-Def equipment, but I sure wish they would train someone to set the time-date portion of their cable signal correctly and check it once in a while.

Checking the signal once in awhile is the problem. About 40 states have a PBS org. that runs inmanned stations from a central Network Ops Center (NOC). Those unmanned stations are located so they cover most of a state's land area, and they microwave their signal from the NOC.

When people had problems with TVGOS a year ago or so, some of the problem was because the TVG data encoder, which Gemstar provided each PBS station, was broken or unplugged, and no one knew until a PBS tech. visited each station to check on things (or they heard from a TVGOS user). And Gemstar refused to allow PBS to install a decoder so they could tell when the Gemstar-provided encoder was not working properly.

Combine that with the govt only providing approx. 40% of PBS revenue, a flaky or non-existent time signal is probably a minor problem for them, I think.

[UnknownVT]

FWIW - my local PBS station - GPB - currently has the WRONG time today Mon Nov/12 - it's on Summer time -

I guess someone changed the time back to Summer time after it was incorrectly set an hour back on the last Sunday of October (10/28 ) according to the old rules -
and they've forgotten to set the clock back on the correct date Sun 11/04.....