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Interesting Find: Auto DST in GW-3000B

6905 Views 22 Replies 13 Participants Last post by  mikenbetts
Found something interesting in my new GW-3000B (Module 5121): at least in the USA, it sets Daylight Savings Time (DST) to "on" when it synchs within the four continental USA time zones.

Here's the situation: I'm in Arizona, where it's MST year-round (except for the Navajos).

1. Set my home city to Denver (DEN).
2. Set DST to off (the indicator says STD, meaning standard time).
3. Returned to normal mode, and everything is kosher.
4. Let the watch synch overnight.
5. Next morning, watch is an hour ahead, and when I display my home time zone, it still shows it as Denver, but with DST "on".
6. Checked the synch indicator, and it says "Y" (Yes, I synched).

So... I figured I made a mistake with the home time zone, so I tried it again. Very carefully following the manual.

Next morning, guess what? Denver is magically set to DST "on" again. Tried this two nights running, with the same results.

Conclusion?
The GW-3000B has an undocumented auto-DST feature. Only thing that I could find supporting this in the manual was this cryptic entry: "As of November 2009, China does not use Daylight Savings Time (DST). If China does go to the Daylight Saving Time system in the future, some functions of this watch may no longer operate correctly." In other words, there is an automatic DST setting for certain time zones, and China is not currently one of them (implying that other zones, namely North America and maybe Europe, are).

I'm posting this for the benefit of others in non-DST locations (AZ, IN), who might otherwise be scratching their heads, thinking that they did something wrong by setting their watch to the correct time zone, overriding DST, and then finding the watch an hour off after a successful synch.

Personally, I'd rather Casio left well enough alone, and allowed an override of DST for every time zone, but there you have it. My fix for the thing, of course, is to simply set my home city to LAX for Summer, and DEN for Winter... oh how I wish they had an AZ zone on their watches. ;)
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As an aside to jmathis (post #2): no worries HST for two reasons: 1) HST is a non-DST time zone, and 2) Hawaii is too far from any of the radios (approx 5,000mi from Denver) to sync.
@gaijin - I'm sorry that I am being so severe. To your point, the workaround is hardly a big deal at all. It's just that for me the appeal of a G Shock lies largely with function. What ruins it for me is that this limitation - for all the reasons already covered previously - is utterly needless and borders on silly. Just sayin'.
You can add the MTG1100 (module 5088) to the list of Casio "Atomic" modules that will not accomadate non-DST states like Az. All 11 of my other Atomic/Solar Casio's allow me to simply turn off DST (including my analog Oceanus 660T). Setting the Home city to LAX during DST and then having to set it back to DEN in November is a pain in the butt but is a legitimate workaround.

After several days of screwing around trying to figure out what I was doing wrong I called Casio for support. Although they were polite and tried to be helpful, nobody seemed to know about this issue. Finally I searched watchuseek and found my answer! It is a great relief to know that my watch module is not defective and is behaving as designed.

Thank you !
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