UTC clock for macOS

As radio amateurs, time is important to us and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), often called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the most important.

We log our QSOs in UTC, (ideally) we give net times in UTC and our clocks need to be accurate to the second for data modes such as FT8, FT4, JT65, JT9 and WSPR.

For a long time, I had a piece of software running on my Mac which I had configured to show UTC in large text, overlaid on the bottom left corner of the screen. This was ideal as I could just glance at it and see the time including seconds.

Sadly the author of this software died some time ago and because it was a 32bit application, it stopped working when macOS Catalina was released so I spent some time looking for an alternative. I couldn’t find anything suitable and instead I looked for a clock I could configure in the menu bar to show me UTC time.

There are many clocks available but none which suited my needs. They all offered far too many functions such as multiple time zones, alarms, moon phase but none of them would give me just UTC including seconds.

I contacted the author of one of these and he very kindly offered to write something for me which does exactly what I wanted.

The result is a Mac application called “Menu Bar UTC” which does nothing more than sit in your menu bar and display the time in UTC, including seconds. It’s customisable so you can set it up exactly how you want and because that’s all it does, it consumes practically zero system resources.

Menu Bar UTC - macOS application

If you have a Mac, I can recommend this handy little utility and thanks to Steve Foster for writing it.

1 Comment

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  1. Thanks man, for this info and app, downloaded and installed on my Mac mini and my MacBook pro.
    It is working like a charm.

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