This is the watch guys take out into snowy mountain terrain, deep woods, jungle, desert or any other extreme environment and must have a watch that handle extreme conditions and always work. GPS reception and navigation, solar, Bluetooth for connecting to a smartphone, activity log tracking, digital compass, barometer, altimeter, thermometer, and of course legendary G-SHOCK toughness. This thing has a ridiculous amount of features. The Plus version adds on basic GPS navigation, similar to a handheld trail unit like the Garmin eTrex where you can save waypoints and such.Ībove is arguably one of best survivalist/prepper wristwatches in existence, the G-SHOCK Master of G GPRB1000 Rangeman.
I use the Android app GPS Test Plus on my phone to get the time and use that to manually sync the time on my quartz watch whenever necessary, which is not often. What options are there if there is no WWV? Once WWV goes off the air, any watch with atomic time sync is no better than standard quartz, and any value a watch with atomic sync had is gone the day WWV is shut down. I don't own any personally, but if I did, I would sell them off because of the uncertain future of WWV. What to do with existing watches that have atomic sync?
GPS time sync, internet time server sync (also synchronized via GPS), NITZ (Network Identity and Time Zone), internal software (depending on who made the phone) and probably several other ways I'm not even aware of - but not WWV. Smartphones sync time using everything but WWV. Hobbyists who use WWV are watch nerds with wristwatches that have an atomic sync function, and ham radio guys.ĭo smartphones use WWV? Nope. Utility companies use it for electric grid sync, meteorologists track weather systems with it, broadcasters use it, and medical institutions use it. When I said WWV was really old, I wasn't kidding. WWV is so friggin' old that it's the world's longest running continuously broadcasting radio station, and will be celebrating its centennial on October 1, 2019. It dates back to 1919 but didn't start doing time broadcasts until 1945, which literally means it's been broadcasting time since the end of World War II.
This being true, I'm going to talk about what will happen when WWV is shut down. It's not a matter of if it will occur but when. I say "for now" because there will come a point when WWV goes off the air. Miraculously - and don't ask me how because I don't know - the the 2019 fiscal budget for the NIST was somehow worked out in a way that keeps WWV in operation - for now. That is the station wristwatches with atomic time sync use in the USA mainland. Back in 2018, President Trump proposed some 2019 funding cuts to the NIST which involved shutting down shortwave (a.k.a.