NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2011 Mar 18, 17:56 -0700
When I was stationed in Korea in the army we always added the suffix "I" to our date/time groups as "I" is the designation for Korea which keeps Z.D. of -9. They don't use daylight savings time in Korea so we used "I" all year long. If they had gone to daylight savings time I believe that we would have used "K" suffixed to the date time group. The reason for the suffix on the date/time group is for communication to other time zones without ambiguity. So if a message was sent to the Pentagon with the "I" suffix there would be no ambiguity in the time as long as "I" was attached to the Z.D. of -9. Otherwise the recipient would have to figure out what country the message had come from and then they would have to figure out if that country is on daylight savings time in interpreting the "I". An example will make this clear. Both New York and Peru are in the Romeo time zone. They are on daylight savings time in New York but on standard time in Peru. Right now it is 2045 in New York but only 1945 in Peru even though they are both in the Romeo time zone. If they both added the suffix "R" to their time groups there would be a conflict that would require figuring out where the message was sent from and whether they kept daylight savings time there. So somebody in New York sending a message should add "Q" to their date/time group. So the New York message was sent at 2045Q and the message sent at the same time from Peru in 1945R which are easily seen as coming at the same time by the one letter difference in the time designation letters. If they both came in with a "R" at the end it would appear that the message from Peru was sent an hour before the message from New York.
So I have come to the conclusion that the zone letters are attached to the Z.D. and not to the geographic area.
gl
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