WS3083 Control Unit gets the time/day/month wrong

[g3nrw]

My Aercus WS3083 Control Unit is installed in what appears to be a poor position to receive a reliable signal from DCF. Consequently the displayed time is almost always (very) wrong -- wrong time, wrong day, wrong month. This is not a time zone issue.

Is there any way to disable the DCF receiver? I am quite happy to update the time manually every once in a while. Moving the Control Unit is not an option.

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Ian

[nitrx]

Mine is synronized but for using cumulus this should be no issue because cumulus doesnt use the console time cumulus uses the computertime

[g3nrw]

Mine is synronized but for using cumulus this should be no issue because cumulus doesnt use the console time cumulus uses the computertime

Ron

Forgive me, I am not yet very familiar with the Cumulus software. I am running v 1.9.4.

I am running the WX station hardware continuously 24/7, but I only run Cumulus when the computer is running -- just a few hours in the day. I had assumed that when Cumulus starts and reads the data records from the WX station, it reads the timestamps from the WX station. The PC clock is meaningless in this situation, as it bears no relationship to the time when the WX station actually collected the data (perhaps many hours earlier). Or have I misunderstood how it works?

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Ian

[steve]

The archive records in the station are not timestamped. They contain the archive interval, and Cumulus has to work back from the current time calculating the timestamp for each archive record by subtracting the archive interval in each record. It uses the computer clock as the starting point, it never reads any date or time information from the console.

[g3nrw]

The archive records in the station are not timestamped. They contain the archive interval, and Cumulus has to work back from the current time calculating the timestamp for each archive record by subtracting the archive interval in each record. It uses the computer clock as the starting point, it never reads any date or time information from the console.

That's more like it! Now I'm beginning to understand.

So I guess everything will work as advertised, provided the Console remains operational 24/7.

Presumably, if there is a break in Console operation, Cumulus will have no means of working backwards to deduce the time of any data readings that were captured before the break occurred?

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Ian

[steve]

That's right. But as the console has battery backup, it would be very unusual for there to be a break in its operation. There is the infamous 'USB lockup' problem, of course, that some of the Fine Offset models suffer from, which requires a reset, which inevitably causes loss of data. Using the 'synchronise Fine Offset reads' setting in Cumulus helps to minimise that.

[g3nrw]

Thanks Steve. All understood. As it happens, the console is powered continuously from a wall wart, so a break in operation is unlikely.

Onwards and upwards.

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Ian