In article ,
(known to some as Alan WA4SCA) scribed...

I have been looking for an "Atomic" clock which can be set to UTC time
for the shack. Since the update feature only works in North America,
most of them can only be set to the local time zones. The couple of
sales people I talked to didn't even understand the question. Any
first hand recommendations? (I have already looked at eHam.)

May as well put in my $0.02 worth.

Last year, at a local ham swap meet, I bought a Trak Systems GPS
station clock. Extremely well-built 1U rackmount package, doubles as a
very stable frequency standard, and puts out an IRIG-B timecode stream
as well so you can drive slave displays with it if you want.

Initial cost: $75 as a "tech special." Put a couple of hours into
it for troubleshooting, and found the problem to be a bad firmware
EPROM. Got the last release of firmware files from the manufacturer,
made new EPROMs, and had a multi-thousand $$ GPS clock to call my own
for about $120 total (counting time and parts).

There are other surplus clocks Out There. Some are more expensive
than others. Datum and TrueTime (both now owned by Symmetricom), as well
as Odetics (out of business) made numerous GPS-referenced clocks. Most
are rack-mounted, most can be set either for GMT or local, and I've yet
to see one in its class that didn't have a timecode output as well.

Prices vary from what I paid to $300 and up.

Happy hunting.


--
Dr. Anton T. Squeegee, Director, Dutch Surrealist Plumbing Institute
(Known to some as Bruce Lane, KC7GR)
http://www.bluefeathertech.com -- kyrrin a/t bluefeathertech d-o=t calm
"Salvadore Dali's computer has surreal ports..."