On 26/10/2020 13:18, VE3KTN wrote:

Bill, your observations about w32tm are interesting (and I just learned something new).  Your statement about running w32tm with default settings, presumably those set as part of the Windows installation, making it a low accuracy SNTP tool implies that parameters can be changed to make it better.  Is that so?  Can you describe what parameters can be changed to improve w32tm operation?  While my laptop is running wsjtx without trouble, its clock tends to glitch every 70 seconds; by that I mean that the time displayed during the glitch will apparently skip a second but it's more a case of the integer seconds "binning" to the nearest value.

Apologies for veering off the original topic of using D4, but it seemed appropriate to comment with my situation.

(BTW, I'm using Meinberg to steer my very drifty laptop's clock and it works quite well but doesn't help with the seconds display binning issue.)

Thanks,

Hugo, ve3ktn.

Hi Hugo,

I suspect that MS have no interest in building an NTP time server network large and robust enough to support their millions of Desktop users. Although MS do publish how to configure win32tm for high accuracy I think that they intend that only for use by network administrators within corporate networks where they have local servers providing NTP services along with AD, Exchange, file servers etc.. The configuration requires manual adjustment of a few registry values and should only be undertaken if you are comfortable doing them. You are much better off using Meinberg NTP Client which will give extremely accurate results from a basic default installation, and it allows selection of pool.ntp.org NTP server pools for reference very easily. Note that pool.ntp.org servers are mostly provided by the community, members are monitored for availability and accuracy, and they are provided for resaonable use without restrictions.

Your displayed time anomalies sound like there may be something loading your system excessively on regular basis that is causing screen updates to be stalled. That is something you should investigate further, it may well also be disrupting decoding of signals.

73
Bill
G4WJS.