Dear developers, 20 m length of end-fed wire sloping down from about 10 to 2 m above urban jungle ground with a mere 5 W to feed it - mine is a "little pistol" setup. I've used the WSPR and WSJT-X programs a lot. I'm very happy what they enable me to do with my small station.
Today, I want to approach you with a bug I found and a feature request, both regarding WSJT-X. First the gist. Details follow. The bug ======= WSJT-X (at least the version I'm using, "v1.1, R3496" from ppa:jnogatch/wsjtx on Ubuntu precise x86_64) could be more robust against sudden system clock changes. Last night, I did see a crash when jumping the system clock while WSJT-X was running. The feature request =================== Secondly, and more importantly, I propose a clock-adjusting feature inside WSJT-X. WSJT-X could temporarily add or substract some value to or from the system's clock's time, to match the clock of the station it tries to contact. This would be useful for both RX and TX. It should be possible to control that manually. For maximum convenience, that feature could kick in whenever I "click on" a particular station and that station's clock deviates from mine more than, say, 0.8 seconds (or whatever is a reasonable value here). The story behind both ===================== Yesterday evening, I excitedly saw that two Australian stations heard my WSPR signals on 40m. Wow! Europe-Australia on 40 would be a first for me! I shut down WSPR, fired up WSJT-X and indeed, I heard one VK on 40m, signals peaking at -12dB. That should give me a chance! Hunting fever set in... ;-) Trying a few times, I had no reason to believe the VK saw my signal. I noticed the VK's clock was about 2-2.5 seconds slow, WSJT-X left no doubt about that. Marginal for decoding, isn't it? So I killed my ntpd and manually set my PC's clock slow, too. Even though this wasn't the first time I had done this, it took me a while to get it right. When I was manipulating the clock in an apparently inopportune moment, WSJT-X crashed on me. Segmentation fault or something. Unfortunately, I did not pay proper attention to details, as I was at that time suffering from a fairly serious case of hunting fever... After restart (and more clock manipulation), WSJT-X no longer decoded most other signals present on the band (who cares?), but the clock difference to the VK was reduced to below one second. This was what I had wanted! That particular VK still never heard me :-(. In the meantime, the signal has dropped to about -15dB. I often get rapports some 7..10 dB below those I send. So maybe my fiddling had simply taken too long. The window had closed. But on similar occasions, clock manipulation has indeed helped me get the contact. (Or so I believe.) So I suggest it to be included as a proper feature of the program. Regards, and a big THANK YOU for providing fine fun software! Andreas, DJ3EI ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ wsjt-devel mailing list wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wsjt-devel
