Adjusted my clock manually.

Wonder if we'll get a software update.. Should be interesting.

 

So what happens on the first Sunday in April?

 

You would of thought Honda/Acura would of had the foresight to change the code to deal with the new DST law on cars built after October 29 2006. This DST change has been on the books for awhile (The Energy Policy Act of 2005).

You can turn off the auto DST function in the setup menu.

 

I manually adjusted mine too. I thought the clock was sync'd to the NAVI System.....

 

I didn't see any instructions in the user's manual for DST. I have a 04 TL, so is it just a matter of turning DST off, and how do you do that?

 

Navigation set up menu. Clock settings is one of the choices

 

yes also very surprised they didnt thing of that

 

So if/when Acura provides a software update, OR once we hit the old DST weekend, how do we get the clock to sync back up with the nav system again? I manually updated mine as well, but am starting to worry that I'm going to have to always manually set my clock from now on - not just for the hour, but for the minutes too. Thoughts?

Thanks,
Mike

 

It is, but the navi reports a standard time which the RDX uses to figure out your local time based on time zone and whether or not it is daylight savings time.

 

When I manually set mine, I noticed that it was not set to adjust automatically for daylight savings time so I was thinking that was the reason it didn't spring forward. Guess not.

 

Found this thread over in the TL forum...

https://acurazine.com/forums/showthread.php?t=154846

Mike

 

They did think of it!

Read your Navigation Manual starting on page 99.

Acura explains that the present DST March/Nov may only be temporary and may expire in 2008. (This is a national political issue.) For this reason the CD data base is using the old DST April/Oct.

It further explains that to avoid problems turn the Auto DST switchover off and reset the clock yourself.

This is all available on Setup, page 2, Clock Adjust.

 

Still doesn't explain how to keep the minutes synced with the nav/sat info though. Once you reset the clock, are you on your own indefinitely?

Mike

 

Oh please. It would take 1 line of code to handle a one time test of new DST dates. "If year = 2007, then change the dates". Just sounds like laziness on someone's part.

 

The minutes, seconds and even nanoseconds are continuously updated by satellite signal. This is necessary to coordinate the clock in your GPS receiver with the $100,000 atomic clocks onboard the satellites. The ability to use an ordinary (non atomic) clock in the receiver through constant updating, is what made GPS widely useful.

The satellite system is only interested in GPS time, which is similar to Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) or what used to be called Greenwich Mean Time or Zulu.
This is based on the Prime Meridian and goes all the way back to when Britannia ruled the waves. Vessels crossing multiple meridians are all on the same hour the world over.

Because your GPS is a receiver the satellite system does not know where you are or care what your Time Zone is. Your location is calculated by your onboard reciever which then plots it on the database map.

The satellites don't know where you are so they can't send you an hour signal other than the GPS hour. That is why the Time Zone and DST (hour unit) must be in your DVD data base. Then you have the option of selecting Auto Time Zone or DST.

(Contrary to Hollywood, no one can track you on your GPS. You must transmit a signal to be tracked.)

 

But my phone gets the right hour. How do it know?

You can turn your phone off in NYC and turn it back on leaving the plane in LA and it has the right hour including DST because it's a transmitter.

The phone is communicating with nearby towers. Lock onto three and the phone company can triangulate your position with remarkable accuracy. (key creepy music.) Most phones allow this feature to be disabled excepting 911 calls.

 

Ok...yes. I knew all that. But if I change the minutes on my car clock manually, how do I get them synced back up with the GPS clock at some point in the future? There's no 'Auto clock' setting anywhere that I can find. Let's face it, our standalone clocks are going to be much less accurate than the atomic clocks - that's why my atomic clock radio resyncs itself every night, and why our PCs do the same via the internet. How do we tell our car clock to resync with the GPS signal? (If it automatically and continuously did that, there'd be no point in allowing us to adjust the minutes on the clock - which they do.)

Mike

 

With Verizon (probably all the major carriers) it gets it's local time from the network. I was out at the bar Saturday night at 2am. My phone did not update till about 2:05am. It went to 3am. But, it should never have gone to 2am at all. Not a big deal but, I found it interesting.

I also find the GPS tracking even more interesting then finding you based on cell towers. On my phone I can turn off GPS execpt for 911 calls. I some how doubt it really turns it off though. With GPS they should be able to locate you to a couple dozen feet or less I think.

 

Actually, this is inaccurate. The phone doesn't transmit anything to get its timezone/time, it just has a much smaller range and so the towers it communicates with are within the same timezone and tell it what the correct local time is. If cell towers could serve more than one timezone then this would be an issue, but there are probably only a small handful of towers that sit on the boundary of a timezone and might talk with phones in another timezone so most towers just say "the time is X and you are in this timezone". There is some amount of transmission going on to negotiate the connection and the service, but none of it is about figuring out which timezone the actual phone is in - that is just assumed based on the limited range and coverage of the tower.

Even if your phone was to transmit something to help with this, and even if the tower had the range to serve multiple timezones somehow, the phone would have no idea where it was relative to the tower to help decide the correct timezone. (Note that new phones are just hitting the market now that have circuits that act like GPS so that they can figure out their position with the help of the tower. These are not full standalone GPS devices, but short range triangulation circuits. This is done to enable location based services like "where is the nearest Starbucks", and it isn't related to the way that cell towers manage network time.)

The problem with the GPS is that the satellites are global and they are all transmitting to up to half of the earth simultaneously so they are talking with GPS receivers in many timezones.

Also, even if a system could manage 2-way communication so that it could tell where you are relative to it, no engineer would ever set up a system that required the central communication point to manage everyone else's location/timezone. That would create a huge load on the central point. It is far better (i.e. more scalable) to build the simple logic for timezone management into the many devices that listen to the central point and have the central point just deal with broadcasting a standard time like GMT...

 

The "network time option" on phones doesn't mean "completely disable the internal clock and constantly listen to the network every second for the time". That would waste far too much battery time. The phone already uses up your battery just listening to whether or not a call is coming in and they want to keep that operation as simple as they can. To add constant time updates to that would eat through your standby time maybe twice as fast. The option simply turns on and off a periodic resynch to the network time. There is likely a several minute gap between synch points to save power in the receiver and the phone relies on the internal clock between those synch points.

I used to use network time here in the Bay Area, but there were a couple of towers around here that were on a bogus timezone (several hours off of the local time) and whenever I drove past them my phone clock would then be off for several minutes - much longer than the time I was likely to be in range for the errant tower.

Most of the GPS on phones is really just a small scale triangulation to the local tower so it can be much more accurate than the full-scale GPS system. Also, the tower has its location pinned down based on surveys much more accurately than a regular GPS receiver might calculate in the same position.

 

On the setup page that lets you set the time manually, there is a button in the lower right corner that lets you reset to auto time. I cannot remember the button label exactly, but I believe it had the word default in it.

 

Agreed, thanks for clarifying this.

 

Gee Mike, I wonder the same thing but nobody really seems to have the answer, or venture forth. I'm thinking to call Acura and find out. I'm sure I wouldn't be the first since the weekend time switch. In the meantime?...I'm just gonna leave the clock alone, and let it switch over in april. I have a watch.

 

My point is that unlike a GPS receiver which is invisible to the system, the tower system does know where the phone is.

If the phone were a receiver only the system could not see it. So the relevant point is not that the phone knows not where it is, but that the tower system does know where the phone is through trianglulation. That is because the phone is a transmitter.

Thank you Flar for very informative piece.

 

Actually Mickie, I think I figured it out. When in the clock settings screen, just push the dial to the right (see the 'Reset' in the upper right corner of the screen?). At first I ignored this because I thought it just reset the default settings (auto daylight off, etc.), but after playing with it a bit, it seems to readjust the time as well.

Mike

 

thanks Mike, I was can't figure out why the GPS doesn't adjust it if it auto adjusts time zones if we drive through a change. I don't imagine acura will give us a free update either, if it's a DVD upgarade problem. Then I guess we'll be auto-adjusting it all the time. So do we have to turn the "auto daylight feature" off also? I just want to make sure that adjusting the clock manually won't effect real time traffic, or any other dates I have set in the computer.

 

Okay, I went and called owerlink and yes, I can turn off the auto feature and change it manualy or just leave it on and wait two weeks for the change. No problem.


Customer service rep also mentioned there will be a "patch" for this free of charge in the future in the form of a DVD. No est time for when though.

 

Woohoo! Their mistake on this could mean free 2008 Nav DVDs for us all!

 

I asked about that, but it was clearified to be a "Patch"