The post below gives me an originalish idea. What you are really trying to achieve is a completely accurate timebase / clock over along period. I understand that power companies measure total cycles sent in a day and make up the time so that long term there are on average 50 (r 60) cycles per second. I imagine that any making up of time is achieved gradually but chances are any change in the rate of change occurs after the ?daily measurement. IF this is still how they do it (rather than just locking the system to a high accuracy standard) and IF the time at which changes are made is constant or nearly so, you may be able to use this to confirm the absolute tome of day. Probably too many IFs but ... Obviously, once you are attached to a powered on mains circuit, your time keeping problems are over. You may be able to calibrate your local oscillator long term against the mains so that you can allow for errors during periods of mains outage. Russell McMahon _____________________________ >From other worlds - www.easttimor.com www.sudan.com What can one man* do? Help the hungry at no cost to yourself! at http://www.thehungersite.com/ (* - or woman, child or internet enabled intelligent entity :-)) -----Original Message----- From: Thomas McGahee To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Date: Saturday, 12 February 2000 10:34 Subject: Re: Internet Toaster [OT] >-----Original Message----- >From: Robert Rolf >To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU >Date: Friday, February 11, 2000 3:37 PM >Subject: Re: Internet Toaster [OT] > >BIG SNIP > >>To be workable and really cheap you'd need the power company to >>broadcast timecode ON the power line so that some really inexpensive >>RF receiver could decode it. The real trick with that is getting >>the signal past all the transformers in your path from the >>power plant. It would be one way to get all those VCR's to stop >>flashing "12:00". >> >>OTOH if the user hasn't the skill to set the clock on the >>coffemaker how will they set the brew time? >> > >Simple. It's a Web-Based Toaster, so use your browser! >It must be both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator compliant, >of course. > >Fr. Tom McGahee >