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Radio Control: Bring accurate timing readily under your control

ChronoTales > Blog > Citizen > Radio-controlled > Radio Control: Bring accurate timing readily under your control

Many among us are not comfortable with the watches that sync to radio signals. We, the urban men, usually stay amidst too many obstructions and hurdles than to invite home another to bother us. Imagine buying a watch in this category and then finding out it doesn’t work with the atomic signal available at where you stay.  The cost of keeping precise time every- and all-the-time is therefore; high. Or at least, it was.

Citizen introduced an ideal system for precise timekeeping around mid-1990; as precise as to go wrong by one second every 100,000 year. That kind of accuracy is out of reach for any mechanical movement maker! Neither with quartz; unless you do something to make a signal traveling from afar check and reset it to the exact time. This auto correction of time and the calendar combined with Eco-Drive technology resulted in relentless, ultra-precise timekeeping. The need to replace batteries or adjusting time manually vanished.

Starting from 1993, CITIZEN has released several multi-band, radio-controlled watches and as pioneers for the type, they have continued leading the field. You can now be dead sure about your every count and countdown to start bang on time!

But, the obstructions and hurdles! Noise from smart phones need to be absent or at a minimum for RC watches to auto sync. That’s not often possible unless it’s past midnight, so you might have to wait until midnight everyday for an automatic fine-tuning to occur. Even then, if it’s a congested area you’re at, signals might have a hard time finding you out. That creates a lag between the time the signal originated and the time it reaches your watch’s receiver. Once that lag crosses 40 milliseconds, consider it lost. Well, most of the times. For, that lag will hamper the accuracy, even if it’s by milliseconds. Wait for some time and demand to sync again for an accurate time-setting. It will also depend upon whether your watch is multi-band or not; if not, then it won’t respond to the signals from another atomic clock it’s not calibrated to. If your watch is calibrated only to the Mount Otakadoya Standard Time Transmitter in Fukushima, Japan; it won’t recognize signals from Fort Collins in US.

The only solution to this problem is a multi-band RC watch that can operate with signals from different geographical regions, namely Europe, US, China, and Japan. However, range for reception is different for different models; add to this radio noise, local topography, buildings and weather and the primary signal gets jumbled up all the more.

But in the RC watch spectrum, Citizen makes some great sense. Simply because, they deliver so much; are multiband, look really, really amazing and they are also comfortable to wear over prolonged periods. See a few of them here clicking on the links before you take the plunge.

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