First exit out of the Smartcaster program by going to quit and picking "YES." This will either take you to a command prompt or to the Supermenu itself. If you get out to a command prompt, type "go" and press ENTER. That will take you to the Supermenu. Using the arrow keys, navigate to button labeled "Clock," and press ENTER.

Now let say for the sake of our demonstration that we are using the Loud Noise Network. Loud Noise has a three minute optional break after the news, which goes until four minutes after the hour. The next break at twenty after, is a two minute mandatory. After that there are two more optionals, a one minute break at forty past, and another two minute break at fifty after.

If you are new to satellite services, you might not know what a mandatory break or an optional break is. A mandatory break is a break not covered by the network. During these breaks, you had better play something because they are not. An optional is a break covered by the network. If you don't take a commercial here, the network will play some ads or play a song.

Now is time to start building the clock. First, start by moving to a clock template that is empty. Move from template to template by pressing the F9 and F10 keys. Once you're ready, press the F1 key to add an event. You will see a white line appear at the top of the screen, and a cursor in blue. The computer is waiting for you to enter a title. I named my event "Loud."

Press ENTER to go to the next entry. The cursor will move under the column entitled "Len." That is short for "length." It wants to know how long the break is in minutes. Mine is three minutes long, so I type "0300" and press ENTER.

Next, the cursor is waiting under the "brk" line. It is waiting for you to tell it whether or not the item in question is a break. Enter "Y" to inform the computer that it is. Always enter "Y" here.

The computer wants the time in the hour that the break is scheduled to play. This one is at four minutes after the top of the hour, so type "0400" and press ENTER.

Now it wants to know if that break is a mandatory. This one is not, so enter an "N." When you press ENTER the cursor will drop down one line in case you want another break of the same length. Here we do not, so press ENTER again. The pie wedge shaped break should appear in the round clock circle.

I repeat the same process for the second break. This one is a little different, so I enter "0200" for the length, enter "2000" for the time, and pick "Y" for mandatory. Since the last break in the hour is also two minutes long, just hit ENTER once, and the cursor will go down one line. This only works if all the info is the same except the time, and whether or not it's mandatory. Go ahead and put in 5000 for the time, and "no" for mandatory. Hit ENTER twice. This will make the pie wedge shaped breaks appear in the circle.

If you've followed along so far, you can probably put the last line together on your own. It's the one-minute optional at forty after, so put in a length of 0100, a time of 4000, and "N" for mandatory.

For this you need to use either the Assign Satellite Clocks Screen (located under Programming on the toolbar) or the Set Active Screen (located on the Supermenu.)