If your clock stops updating
The Clear Sky Institute server is offline. Your HamClock doesn't have to be.
In January 2026 we lost Elwood Downey, WB0OEW, HamClock's creator. The original Clear Sky Institute server that fed every HamClock its data is now offline. Clocks still pointed at it won't receive correct data. Point yours at hamclock.com and it keeps ticking.
The one-line switch. Open a terminal on your clock — Raspberry Pi, Inovato Quadra, or any Linux box running HamClock — and run:
$ curl -fsSL https://hamclock.com/tools | sudo bash
That's it. The script finds every place HamClock launches from — desktop icon, autostart, systemd, cron — and points them all at hamclock.com. It also cleans up any old-server redirects left behind by earlier fixes. Safe to run more than once; if there's nothing to do, it says so and changes nothing.
Did the switch bring your clock back? hamclock.com runs on community support — a few dollars keeps it on the air.
Prefer to do it by hand?
Add -b hamclock.com:80 to the end of the HamClock command wherever it launches — the Exec= line of its desktop or autostart entry, its systemd unit, or its crontab line. The script above just does this for you, everywhere at once.
Already used the /etc/hosts trick?
Some earlier guides had you redirect the old server by editing /etc/hosts. That pins your clock to one fixed server address, which breaks the moment anything moves. The switch script above finds those entries, comments them out so nothing is lost, and moves you to the supported -b method — which follows hamclock.com wherever it lives.
