Well that's all I run as well is PRO and have on 10, 7, 8.1, XP.

 

Ed..

 

From: David Fisher [mailto:dsfis...@outlook.com] 
Sent: Monday, December 3, 2018 9:30 PM
To: WSJT software development <wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [wsjt-devel] use of NTP with WSJT-X disrupted by Windows 10
updates

 

It sounds like you are making a good argument for running Pro rather than
Home.  I run Pro only.  Checking this system, the Windows Time service is
disabled and NTP is enabled and running.  It makes sense for a Home system
to make changes like this in order to keep things running for users who
probably don't understand matters at this level.  There may very well be a
work-around that will keep WTS turned off.

 

Dave / NX6D

 

 

  _____  

From: Matt Power <mhpo...@mit.edu <mailto:mhpo...@mit.edu> >
Sent: Monday, December 3, 2018 7:13:17 PM
To: wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
<mailto:wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> 
Subject: [wsjt-devel] use of NTP with WSJT-X disrupted by Windows 10 updates


 

WSJT-X on Windows has generally expected that the machine has
third-party NTP software and doesn't use the Windows Time service.
This affects clock accuracy, and consequently affects decoding
performance in various ways, including the possibility of being
affected by the recently identified "negative DT" issue. It may be
important to know that recent Windows software, including at least
Windows 10 Home 10.0.17134, can automatically change the system
configuration to turn on the Windows Time service if the end user has
disabled it.

Here's a specific scenario in which a WSJT-X user may have done a
proper time-synchronization setup that was later "helpfully" undone by
Microsoft:

1. The user was originally using 1.9.x on Windows 10 and carefully
read
https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/wsjtx-doc/wsjtx-main-1.9.1.html

2. This says "The built-in Windows facility for time synchronization
is usually not adequate. We recommend the program Meinberg NTP (see
Network Time Protocol Setup" and links to
http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/setup.html

3. That page says "You should also check in the Control Panel, Local
Services, that the Windows Time service is set to Disabled."
(Similarly,
https://www.meinbergglobal.com/english/info/ntp-w32time.htm says "Note
that w32time service may only be enabled when no other ntp daemon is
installed on your system. Otherwise the two services come into
conflict.")

4. If the user followed all of those instructions, then that
configuration ordinarily would have stayed in place across
reboots/updates/etc. HOWEVER, this may have recently changed, with no
notice, to a misconfiguration in which BOTH Windows Time and Meinberg
NTP are running. To check for this possibility:

5. On the Windows 10 system, start Event Viewer and go to "Windows
Logs" and then "System"

6. Look for events with Level=Information, Source=Service Control
Manager, Event ID=7040

7. You might notice one or more recent events of "The start type of
the Windows Time service was changed from disabled to demand start."
In my case, the only one was at 8 AM local time on December 2. (I was
not using my computer at that time.) Similarly, you might notice, as I
did, that the Windows Time service is now running, whereas previously
it was not. Also -- and this is NOT NECESSARILY related -- you might
notice, as I did, that FT8 decoding with 2.0.0-rc5 suddenly started to
fail intermittently, soon after that Windows event happened. (Very
roughly: 70% of receive cycles have a plausible number of decodes, and
30% have zero decodes.)

Other notes:

If anyone is seeing poor 2.0.0-rc5 decoding performance, you might
want to do something like: stop the Windows Time service, restart the
Network Time Protocol Daemon service, restart WSJT-X, and look at
whether that helped.

I don't yet know of a best long-term fix.

I don't know all of the possible impacts of running Windows Time and
third-party NTP simultaneously. Almost certainly, WSJT-X decoding will
be worse, but how much worse is hard to predict. It may depend on
various race conditions that vary with the specific vendor and version
of the NTP software.

Over the past two years or so, Microsoft has been making a number of
changes with the goal of blocking the ability of Windows 10 Home users
to skip updates. For example, if you make a manual change to disable a
service such as Windows Update or Background Intelligent Transfer
Service, then it will be re-enabled automatically. Possibly, Windows
Time is the latest addition to the set of forbidden changes. I haven't
seen this announced or discussed anywhere, though. If Microsoft indeed
does not want Windows 10 Home users to control their own Windows Time
service, then there might not be any supported workaround. The only
workaround might be unsupported (changing the registry, scripts to
re-disable, etc.).

When Microsoft takes this type of step (e.g., Service Control Manager
policy changes), it typically goes into effect on different people's
PCs at different times over a period of weeks or months. It is
possible that this has overlapped much of the WSJT-X 2.0.0-rc release
cycle. In other words, for an unknown subset of users, seeing
unexpectedly few decodes with one of the 2.0.0-rc releases is not
caused by any WSJT-X defects, WSJT-X misconfigurations, or user
errors. It is entirely the consequence of a Windows behavior in which
time services are automatically and silently misconfigured, after
working correctly for months or years.

Matt, KA1R


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