The Peter Jensen Tube Clocks
A while back I purchased two nixie tube clocks from TubeClock.com, a wacky place to get some of the most worthless (after all, let’s be honest here – they are using nixie tubes, but not near as worthless as the Chronulator which I still want to get as well) yet most awesome clocks on the planet.
There are actually a lot of different sites that sell nixie clocks, and you can find lots of tubes on ebay, for instance. However, the clock I use the most is Peter’s IN14 6 Tube Kit with the GPS attachment. I have it prominently placed in my amateur radio station and it is set for UTC. The GPS puck, a Garmin unit, is sitting on the sill of a window nearby. With this set up, the clock maintains absolutely perfect time.
Once a day the clock sets the minutes and seconds, then the rest of the day the clock uses the second pulses from the GPS satellites to keep the seconds ticking.
I have had this particular clock running for about a year and a half now. In that time, I have only seen the clock glitch one time – for some reason it ended up being 35 seconds off. I am not sure if RF interference did something or what, but it did reset itself. Same with the leap second that was injected into the time stream at the end of 2008.