Abstract: The present invention receives time of day information from a time code grator which employs Pulse Duration Modulation (PDM) code and decodes it in a manner that is frequency independent and time-lag compensated. According to the present time-code reader, the time-coded input is decoded into peaks (amplitude modulated cycles) carried on a normal sine wave. The number of these cyclical peaks are proportional to the duration of the D. C. pulse of the PDM code and can be counted to determine whether a binary 1 or 0 has been transmitted. Because a peak may be lost or missed due to distortion, the invention reads four to six peaks as a 1 and less than four peaks as a 0. The serially received 1's and 0's are transmitted through a network which takes approximately one second to pass data from input to output display. To compensate for this time lag, one second is added on to the output reading to make it contemporaneous with the input signal.