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A puzzling night of unusually incomprehensible dreams. Anyone eavesdropping on my bedroom last night (by bouncing a laser off the window, say) would have heard me wake up at regular intervals, roll over, mutter ‘What the !@$% was that all about?’, and go back to sleep.
Today I will get my own back by puzzling someone else, since at lunchtime I plan to go into town and ask Robert Sayle nicely to explain to me how a clock which sets itself from radio signals can possibly manage to be consistently four hours slow. And hopefully get them to give me one which isn't…
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I don't think so, though. A bit of Googling turned up the specification of the Rugby time signal, which is actually transmitted in UK local time with a bit to indicate whether it's currently BST or GMT. So a simple UK analogue-style wall clock would have to be pretty perverse to carefully convert BST back to GMT, decode the full time and date information, consult its time zone database and end up back in BST; far more likely it's simply ignoring the BST bit and setting itself to whatever local time it receives.
(Also, if it were timezone-switchable I'd at least expect some sort of jumper on the back so it could be reconfigured.)
My own gut feeling is that the clock can't directly sense the position of its hands. I imagine there's a notch of some sort on the shaft which it can sense, and setting itself to the right time involves rotating the shaft until the notch is in the right place. It would therefore be a trivial assembly error to put the hands on the shaft in such a way that they failed to align properly with the notch, causing a consistent time difference.
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