Thought this may be of interest to some of you.

If you have a smartwatch/iwatch which automatically synchronizes its time via Bluetooth or elsewhere then its probably best you stop reading this thread right now. This will probably be of no interest to you. In fact this thread may just bore you to death!  ;-) 

There are plenty of so called atomic watches/clocks hitting our shores. These watches can be found mostly on trademe/ebay and in plenty of our stores. The watches are all advertised as featuring “Multi-Band Atomic Timekeeping” functions. This means they can sync their time with a number of transmitters around the world. An awesome feature if you living in The UK, Europe, Americas, Japan or China.

In New Zealand and Australia however, what they don’t tell you is that this function is pretty useless. There are no radio clock transmitters anywhere near us. Our closest one, Radio VNG in Australia stopped transmitting about 10 years ago. That said, there are some reports that it is sometimes (very rarely) possible for the clock to sync with the JJY Radio in Japan. Anybody in NZ had success? 

Anyway, I decided to go down the route of starting a mini project. Build my own Radio-Clock transmitter at home. That way my watch could sync automatically every day. When researching the subject however I found that somebody has already done all the hard work. Oh well.  This website uses a Java app which simulates the Japan JJY Signal:

http://www.jrcomputing.com.au/Set_Watch/Set_Watch_Auto.html

You then just place your watch close to your laptop earphones and bingo. It syncs.

Somebody else went as far as making an iphone app. 

So as it turns out, these watches are not so useless after all. 

Here is my latest one. An oldschool Casio GWM5610 Now to build myself a small antenna, hook it up to my raspberry pi and start transmitting around the house. 

Anybody else here played around with this stuff?