Cell Phone Clock Accuracy

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Over a short time yes, but you would need to synchronise all phones at exactly the same time - just as you would with wrist watches.

But I would suggest your requirements are FAR too strict for synchronising?.
Here again the idea is to start all the phones at a predetermined time according to their clocks.
 
The 0.01 seconds would be difficult to be sure about over 20 minutes, but at 30 ppm it would only be 0.04 seconds.

The whole problem comes down to setting the clocks on the cellphones. It doesn't make much difference if the clocks were set at the previous hour or at the point where the music starts, you are looking to get some time-critical signal to lots of cellphones at the same time.

I think that the best approach to this might be to use the GPS time. The GPS signals have extremely accurate clocks, although GPS time is a few seconds different from UTC. If you can get an app to look at GPS time, and know whether or not you have applied the UTC correction, and use GPS time to start the music and the fireworks.

The GPS system only uses signals travelling to the GPS receivers, there is no signal back from a GPS receiver, for instance in a cellphone, to the satellites. As a result, it is a pure broadcast signal and every receiver gets the same signal. That is very different from cellular signals, wifi or bluetooth which are all duplex signals. So when your phone asks a time server for the time of day, that time signal only goes to your phone, via an indeterminate number of devices, so the time signal may be corrupted by fractions of a second. If other phones also ask for the time, each packet of data is separate, and may be delayed differently.

I guess that you will need to have some app to start the music at the right time anyhow. I doubt if anything like that is fitted to most phones. The app could also keep the timing in line during the 20 minute performance, so your local accuracy becomes unimportant, as long as your cellphones can get a clear satellite signal.
 
Study on what? - assuming you mean telephones been synchronised to better than 10mS then I seriously doubt it, as there's nothing to study.
If you had a thousand cell phones would they, could they all display the same time within a hundredth of a second?
 
If you had a thousand cell phones would they, could they all display the same time within a hundredth of a second?

With my cell phone the best displayed time resolution I see is HH:MM:SS. Using an Android GPS time application named GPS Time I can display Device Time and GPS Time with 1 second resolution and the time difference out to .001 second. Using my alarm apps the best I can do is set an event to happen with HH:MM resolution. I haven't a clue what the propagation time is for the alarm to start. When setting an alarm or event app the best resolution I get is HH:MM with no seconds resolution. I seriously doubt you can get this to work as you want it to. Since this is for pyrotechnics why not run everything including the music from a laptop as I mentioned earlier? I can appreciate the need to synchronize the shots to music but I don't see how this can be dome using cell phones and I doubt you can sync several cell phones with a system time within 10 mS.

Ron
 
Ron; The inquiry was for a cell phone app that claims it can sync a show and music using cell phones.
We would use this for distributing music to personal phones for pyro musicals.
But they would all need to start at the same time.
I am meeting with the people soon to learn more about their app.
I will update after talking with them.
 
Hello there,

Funny this should come up, because the other day (three days ago) we tested an atomic watch with signals from WWV in Colorado. The watch was definitely within 1 second, as the second hand moved to the "12" at the exact time the time signal tone sounded on the receiver. It looked like clockwork
We only tested it twice within about a 10 minute time period, so maybe we got lucky, i dont know. We'll be testing it from time to time again in the future. The watch itself was priced at over $200 USD.
I dont know how often it updates, maybe i'll try to find out.
 
Sometimes two completely separate FM radio stations play the same song at the same time. The sync is pretty bad.
 
.01 seconds timing you say?

Okay so how are you getting your ignitors, lift powders and actual fireworks to light, burn and detonate with .01 second accuracy and how about the sound timings Vs where the observers are positioned relative distance wise to where the fireworks actually go off at and where the music sound is coming from?

Seems like there are some variable here that would be impossible to compensate for given those pesky laws of physics that always get in the way of ideal perfection.
 
SO, why can't the app synchonize to a network time server (NTS), then when it gets really close, say within 500 mS, it uses the synced internal clock for the final start?

There still has to be some sort of delay, I would think between the time actually reported by the NTS and and when the packet is received by the phone.

You would also have the issue of everyone wanting the time at the same time so that might not work either.

Your bet shot might be to sync to an NTS server, but at random times (each phone) before the start, then relay on the internal clock of the phone.
Read the NTS and you know how far off you are and assume that everyone receives it in about the same time.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5908
 

Hi,

That's how ingrained science got into us. It's not the laws of physics that does it, it's nature that does it. The laws of physics are man made.
 
By osmosis:

You have a dozen people listening to a broadcast on their cell speakerphones instead of earbuds. Can they be in sync?

It's not the fireworks vs the sound. If they are all delayed the same who cares unless it's excessive,

==

Could it not be a UDP multicast stream? Sort of like a live broadcast of the president's speeches? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast
 
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Hi,

What is the significance of this to you?
Different radio stations is the same with trying to sync the fireworks explosions with the cell phone 1812 Overture cannons sound. Poor sync.
An additional timing problem of the slow speed of sound delaying the explosion sounds of the fireworks will add poor sync with the cannons sound in the music. For safety the watcher/listeners must be a distance away from the fireworks.

Maybe a low power (legal) FM transmitter can play the music to the watcher/listeners cell phones FM radios.
 
A few years ago my brothers fireworks business got asked to do the local Minot 4th of July show and they had requested it to be set to music and one of the local radio stations was going to do the music feed. Dismal failure being that exactly at a 11 PM the show was to start and exactly at 11 PM the radio station decided to get a few more commercials in before starting the music. Last time he ever tried syncing a public show to music.

Also when doing private shows synching to music rarely works being there is no guarantee that every individual shot is going to actually light off exactly at the right time plus depending on where you are shooting from and where the audience is sitting the sounds never match up.

A good example is with the salute shots. Given the big ones are pushing up hundreds feet in the air plus angled away from the audience there can easily be a second and more time delay from when the salute bursts and when the sound gets to the audience over what a lower shot would give.
 
Can't a cannon be triggered electrically? Then there is no fuse to light and no wait for it to burn. It is the cannon that makes the boom sound, not the cannon ball exploding high in the air.
When I was young my friends and I played with chemicals. Our rockets blew up immediately and the bombs went pretty high.
 
Simple enough to check. Find someone with a shortwave radio and tune in to WWV. The National Bureau of standards. They broadcast on 2.5, 5, 10, and 20 MHz.
 
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