Understanding Your GMT, the Traveler’s Best Friend

Time seems to move at a different pace when you’re on the road. Stimulated by novelty and challenge, the hours expand as if swollen with experience so that a day of travel occupies the same amount of space in your mind as a week of ‘normal’ home life.

You experience this difference as a traveler, but the watch on your wrist is immune to these distortions. To this precision piece of engineering, time moves at the same pace no matter where you are in the world. Harnessing this simple truth led to the development of one of the biggest horological breakthroughs of the 20th century: The GMT movement.

With two hands moving in lock-step but at different speeds, GMT watches allow you to take in two time zones at a glance — the hour at home, and the hour abroad. Since they took to the skies at the dawn of the commercial aviation era some seventy years ago, GMT movements have been the sought-after companion of pilots, adventurers, business travelers, and wanderers.

For many decades, GMT movements were a luxury complication reserved for a very thin echelon of society. TRASKA is proud to have been on the vanguard of independent watchmakers who, thanks to innovations in automatic watchmaking that occurred in Japan, were able to bring traveler’s GMT movements into a more accessible price range.

The Venturer GMT is our contribution to the genre. The style of GMT we use is what is known as a ‘traveler’s’ GMT or, controversially, is sometimes also referred to as a ‘true’ GMT. First designed for pilots, the independently adjustable GMT hand makes it easy for you to set your watch to a new timezone the moment your plane touches down, while always knowing what time it is for your family back at home.

Take a look at the photo above. The standard hour hand moves around the dial once every 12 hours, and it tells the time the way you’ve always learned to read it. The GMT hand moves slower, making one rotation every 24 hours, you read it by looking at the 24-hour bezel. By adjusting the 24-hour bezel, you can quickly adapt to a new time zone while the ‘normal’ dial stays loyal to the time back at home.