Don Maxwell wrote:
The 740's clock has confounded me, too. Why, for example, do I have to select Daylight or Standard time? And what is supposed to happen if I do. (I've tried many combinations and permutations of the possibilities and am still confounded.)
The 740 (or any other iFly hardware device) does not have a constant connection to the internet like...well, just about everything else these days.
Your phone always knows the local time *and* daylight savings setting because it's *always* in commuincation with your service provider, and your service provider knows your phone's location to within a few hundred feet, at worst. The "smarts" on whether to apply daylight savings adjustments in your current location are built into the cell network, not the phone itself, which is why you don't have to worry about adjusting the time on your phone, even as you move around the country (though it you put it in airplane mode as you travel, it may take it a short time to re-sync after reconnecting to the network).
Your internet-connected PC or Mac also gets a very accurate timing signal automatically from the Internet. Your computer may also have defaulted to (or you may have selected during initial setup) "automatically adjust for daylight savings time", so your computer may routinely make those updates without you thinking about them.
But the start/stop times for daylight savings can change, and while it's easy for the cell service back end to keep track of all that for you, and while Apple and Microsoft push regular updates to their OS's and so can update those details when they change, your iFly device doesn't get either of those benefits. Its OS may never be updated by a user, and it may rarely (or even never!) be connected to the Internet. And while it may know where it is via its built-in GPS, it does not automatically try to figure out what time zone it's in, any more than your laptop or (non-cell-enabled) tablet does.
Instead, it has two simple settings, which are manually controller by the user: Time zone, and DST on/off. Your 740 gets GPS time, which is UTC (GMT). It then applies the correction to convert to your time zone (e.g., minus 6 hrs to convert to Central Standard Time). If the DST setting is "off", it stops there. If DST is "on", then it adds one hour back to correct for DST (for a net of minus 5 hrs to convert to Central Daylight Time).