Wrong time on DTT trial EPG

Alun

I've been using my new Philips TV with integrated DVB-T tuner to watch the DTT trials and noticed today that the clock that you can display on the screen was about 1.5 minutes behind the real time (as displayed both by my radio-controlled clock and the time on my PC which is synchronized with a number of internet time servers). The time displayed on the EPG screen is the same, and coincidentally also seems to be the same (incorrect) time as shown on my RDS equipped radio tuner.

As a side note, whenever the changeover from summer time to winter time and vice versa occurs, it always seems to take the RDS time at least a week to be corrected, which makes me think that there's something fairly fundamentally screwed up somewhere within RTE regarding time synchronization.

rlogue

Perhaps they wait until someone rings up to complain??

watty

The Trial is not run by RTE. Since it is not a released Public service, there is no-one to complain to about time error.

JHMEG

My old Kenwood car stereo had its clock set by RDS on whatever was on preset channel #1, on which I had RTE Radio 1. Driving across country the time varied hugely from one transmitter to another. On 88.5 or 89.1 (can't remember) the time was out by 1.5 hours last time I checked. Damn annoying as it was the only clock in the car.

Alun

rlogue wrote:

Perhaps they wait until someone rings up to complain??

I always send an email and complain about the RDS issue, and magically it gets fixed for a while just after I've sent the email No acknowledgement, of course, and after that the time just seems to drift. There's only a certain amount of complaining one can do. I've even offered my services to rectify the problem (I'm a network engineer with some experience of time synchronization techniques).

Alun

watty wrote:

The Trial is not run by RTE. Since it is not a released Public service, there is no-one to complain to about time error.

It's suspicious though that the incorrect DTT EPG time and the incorrect RDS time are almost exactly the same though. RTE certainly seem to be 'fix' that particular problem when I email them.

watty

Indeed getting correct time is not hard these days, not like when I was in the BBC and the studio clocks all on an electric loop driven by a master electromechanical pendulum clock. Some schools in 1960s had that system. One of my tasks in late 1970s was to phase lock that mechanical pendulum to 5MHz derived from Rubdium reference or some such somewhere.

SPDUB

I think it might have been "Mailbag with Arthur Murphy" ( I think that was it's name ) but i remember seeing a feature years ago about teletext on RTE and someone asking why the clock on it not being at the correct time and the answer was that to the effect that because they were limited in the amount of resources they had and had to run the whole teletext service off one or two pc's other features of the teletext service were given higher priority than timekeeping