Hi,

Does any part of the Empeg (including hijack) software use the time and date information from FM broadcasts to correct the date on the Empeg?

If so, how is it done?

No. The only part of the empeg that uses time information from the radio is the "Info: Radio" screen, and that gets it from the FM-RDS data stream, not the other FM radio time that your VCR uses to set its clock.

More information here.

Don't know about the US but over here the VCRs that have that ability just get it from the teletext stream and not some FM radio signal...

That's the way my VCRs work. It's usually on the PSB station.

That's the only way I've ever seen a VCR get its time automatically.

Don't devices that set their time over radio waves use shortwave and not FM anyway? I have a watch that does that.

Well, WWVB runs at 60kHz. I guess that would be longwave, technically.

Hi,

Thanks for the replies. Yup, RDS clock - that is what I was talking about.

Cheers,

Um yeah, that's right, that's what I meant. I'd forgotten how VCRs get their time signal. Must have gotten it confused in my head because of the split in VHF tv frequencies between channels 6 and 7. In our area, I can tune my FM radio down to the bottom of its band and get TV channel 6's audio stream, and it also happens that channel 6 is the channel our VCR gets its time clock from.

Anyway, to answer the question definitively: No, the empeg does not set its clock to the RDS time. In the US, this is a good thing because that way your clock isn't as wrong as the RDS clock at most radio stations.

Hm. I guess a ReplayTV gets its time the same way, instead of over the (internet/dialup) when it's confused, because letting it sit for 5 hours with a network and no cable, it still couldn't reset its clock.

ReplayTVs only sync once a night, or when you manually tell them to. They do set the clock over the network connection, which causes problems if you want to use your lifetime subscribed unit in vcr mode without any connection.

Matthew

I mean that for the one RDS station I can get in my area, the clock is always hours off, as if they never even set the clock or they don't know how to.

Also, when I get the RDS text data from the station, it's frequently corrupted, presumably due to transmission errors, and I'd hate to imagine what that kind of a transmission error would do to the time signal if I were setting my clock by that.

Well, there are a couple of options here.

Firstly a program could reject all timestamps that are more than a couple of seconds different to internal time.

Alternatively, if the clock looks like it is keeping good time, just the wrong time you could calculate the initial offset and then subtract the result from every subsequent timestamp received over the air. That would at least stop the Empeg clock from drifting any further.