Yes, possibly it would help if individual users choose an OS other than Windows 10 Home. This doesn't solve the general problem. The presence of any users with misconfigured time synchronization hurts everyone because it reduces the probability that an arbitrary QSO attempt will be completed efficiently. For example, suppose a DX station can complete QSOs at a rate of N per hour when all callers have accurate time (within milliseconds). If everything else stays the same, but part of the caller population is replaced by stations whose time is wrong by a few seconds, then the rate is going to drop to a new value less than N. (For example, some of the callers will happen to decode a CQ but not decode the report when they are answered.)
The current misconfiguration problem is a user running both the W32Time and NTP services. WSJT-X could, at least in theory, check for this in the MainWindow constructor when running on Windows. If OpenService is non-NULL for both W32Time and NTP, and the QueryServiceStatusEx dwCurrentState equals SERVICE_RUNNING for the handles of both W32Time and NTP, then MessageBox::critical_message could alert the user. See the https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/Services/starting-a-service example code. I don't know how to add that into a Windows build environment based on GCC, but maybe someone else knows. Other warnings could be added in a similar way (e.g., alert Windows users when neither of the two recommended NTP programs -- Meinberg or Dimension 4 -- is running). This could potentially help many users, although admittedly not everyone (e.g., people who don't realize that their firewall is blocking NTP). Matt, KA1R _______________________________________________ wsjt-devel mailing list wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wsjt-devel
