[Lowfer] Playing with WSPR-15

[listread at lwca.org]

Unfortunately, I wasn't free to go to the field yesterday... and am not
sure I was sufficiently thawed from the weekend's subzero temperatures to
want to go, anyway... but I can confirm from experience that resetting the
computer clock during reception WILL prevent a decode of an otherwise fine
signal, both in WSPR X v0.8 and WSPR 2.12.

My machine has no way to re-sync itself in the field, but I learned the
hard way that doing it manually has that effect on WSPR. My RTC may stay
rock steady for 24 hours if temperatures are moderate, but can drift a
second every 12 hours or so if there are temperature extremes like last
Saturday's (53 degrees, calm, and plenty of moonlight at midnight, but 20
degrees and blowing snow by noon). WSPR often randomly reports that much
DT from one decode to the next, regardless, so I generally don't fret
about it.  If I'm targeting a single station with less than 100% duty
cycle, I may take advantage of off-time to do a reset with WWV, but
otherwise I just observe the DT trend and only sacrifice a decode to reset
if/when it looks like I'm reaching the two second mark.

FWIW, the stability issues I used to experience with WSPR X made me
reluctant to try monitoring SIW in WSPR-15 this year, but it has behaved
flawlessly for months now! Perhaps some of the Windows (7) Updates that
I've received since reluctantly bowing to the Will of Microsoft finally
did some good. Redmond be praised!

John D


On Tue, December 20, 2016 9:41 am, John Andrews wrote:
> Bill,
>
>
> Yeah, I'm guessing that the clock re-syncs might be an issue. I didn't
> monitor myself, due to the incompatibility of WSPR-X and my other computer.
> But Garry, Lloyd and others seemed to be getting regular decodes.
>
>
> I probably won't run 15 again tonight. May try good old DFCW to assess
> the TA chances.
>
> John, W1TAG
>
>
> On 12/20/2016 9:32 AM, Bill de Carle wrote:
>
>> (snip)
>>
>>> Am testing WSPR-15 on 137.610 kHz (136.000 dial) this afternoon,
>>> hopefully top and bottom of the hour. Trying to see if the old quirky
>>> WSPR-X program will be stable this time. May run it into the evening
>>> if it works.