Let me start off by saying that I don't know anything about this subject and I am sure that more knowledgeable people will come along and help us discover the best way to handle this issue.

This past weekend, we had a field activity with the local radio club. We went out to a state park and operated the Ohio QSO Party from a shelter house using portable power and field antennas. One guy was trying to work FT8 but he as having very little luck. The whole day he managed to work six stations. I couldn't understand it. He tried two different antennas that to me, would have been perfectly adequate. Then another guy chimed in that it was obvious that the PC time was way off. So, we tried in vain to fix it. We tried manually setting it using the time on our cell phones and it didn't help a whole lot. We tried to connect the PC to a cell phone's wifi, but the location we were at didn't have hardly any cell phone signal.

So, today, I started researching how to sync your PC's clock to a GPS receiver. Again, I know almost nothing about this, so I Googled it, clicked on the first thing that covered the issue, and implemented it.
The article I read is here: Synching PC time with GPS for field digital modes
Which led me to this software which I paid for and downloaded: Visual GPS LLC

I already had the GPS from a Raspberry Pi project (Pi Gate) and it took me about five seconds to get this working on my laptop that I use for field portable communications.

Again, I am sure there are many other options, which may be cheaper. But this was easy and dummy proof.

BKTTimeSync is free and works fine for me, using a little less than $10 USB GPS receiver.

With a little trial and error one can generally get within 1/2 second by manually setting the clock to WWV, or just listening to a busy FT8 frequency. Over 1/2 second IME starts to noticeably degrade performance on FT8.

Thread on the receivers:
https://www.ar15.com/forums/outdoors/VK172-USB-GPS-receiver-an-inexpensive-GPS-Reciever-/22-691907/

There are cell phone apps that are pretty accurate.

Here's an example.

There are also GPS apps that can directly display GPS time.

Thanks

I guess this has all been discussed before in that other thread. I sort of remember seeing that other thread but I guess at the time I didn't care.
Anyway, I have a good workable solution to the problem.
In addition, I ordered two more of those USB GPSs from that other thread and will try the free software mentioned in a previous post.

If you run ntp, there you can set up the ntp daemon to use nmea output from GPS recievers,
and if you get really fancy, add PPS to that as well.

I have a Pi dedicated to being an ntp server connected to a GPS module with a 1 PPS output,
so I'm good to within a few tens of nanoseconds.

I did it portable in a remote location on solar / battery power by listening to the WWV broadcast on HF and manually syncing my tablet at the top of the minute. Got it first try within 0.3 of everybody else on FT8

I started to do that once. Don't remember what happened. I got sidetracked or something. Or it might have been that I didn't have the slightest idea what the hell I was doing.

Yeah any GPS reciver will work. My GD Mr-1 has a built in GPS I pull nema time off when I need to use ft8 or jt65.

BKT timensync will pull either nema time or ntp time.

You only have to be within a second. You can set it off of wwv or even the other stations that are transmitting.

I was looking at FT8 yesterday with an sdr and half the stations are out of time sync by a second or so

For those folks at home, with an internet connection.

Assuming your local NTP server is accurate and up to date:

Start type "cmd" to find the command prompt link.  right click -> run as administrator

w32tm /resync

I just snapped this picture to show how different peoples time is.

Attached File

Isn't all this a good argument for good old fashioned, simple RF radio work?

Well...........depends.

Ham Radio is a hobby and while I am not well educated I still enjoy the technical aspects of the hobby. And I enjoy working my way through a problem like this because I not only figure out the solution to the problem, but I have fun doing it and learn a lot in the process.

Once again, for me, ham radio isn't about the destination; it is about the journey.

I'm not seeing any bad problems there. You have to look at the start of transmission, not the end of transmission, because the ends can vary somewhat depending on the content.

Looking at the start of the next time epoch, you can see one station is quite early. He might be a problem. Then there are two that are just a tiny bit early, those will probably decode just fine. The rest are spot on.

@RatSass: not at all. Indeed, people work far less hard learning to do something like this than they do learning Morse code. And people are highly motivated by FT8 and FT8call, because with just a tiny, little bit of skull sweat you can start making contacts like crazy with a station that required very little effort to set up. Using FT8 allows one to save a ton of time and money. You can have fun with crappy, small, low, portable antennas. No need to buy expensive amplifiers. And all that sort of thing.

Yes, you can certainly make old-fashioned, simple RF contacts (CW or phone) without big antennas, without big amp's, but the number of potential contacts per hour is much less with phone, and the geographic diversity of those contacts is much smaller. The popularity of FT8 is undeniable. Just look at any FT8 sub-band to know that.

That said, I like phone much better than FT8. However I'd love to set up a station that ran FT8call all the time on a separate radio as both a combined mailbox and doorbell. I'm not there, yet.

Yes that's what I'm getting at. There are three stations that are not dead nuts ntp wwv GPS disciplined timed and they still get decoded.

As a brand new General class HAM.  Well...  brand new HAM period.

SSB phone is...  slow.  Hunting for contacts, much less DX contacts is not working out.  Yes, I have DXLabs spot collector going and all that jazz.  When they do pop up (on SC) often I can't hear them.  Or maybe I can but I can't understand them.

FT8 is...  simpler.  Select the band and start listening.  Double click on a station to begin a contact.  All the other FT8 stations are right there and transmitting.  No hunting for them.  No worrying you're going to forget the procedure or someone is going to use an obscure prosign which will cause a delay while you look it up.

FT8 is just easier.  Or perhaps more correctly, WSJT-X is just easier.

And in my case, I have worked HF on SSB & CW for decades and enjoy the digital modes because they are something different.

If you don't have that receiver, try the android app at that same web site.

In my house, I have to get near a window & sometimes outside before the phone app sees enough satellites & syncs. It does work. Depending how drifty your PC clock is determines how often you need to sync.

That's what I do. It works pretty well, until WWV shuts down.

After that youll jave to drop 20 bucks on a USB GPS dongle. The horror, the horror...

Very cool - Thanks!

Wouldn't be shocked if W1AW or someone starting transmitting a beacon with awfully good
timing intervals. You could come close to that with the NCDXF network now, actually, since
they have to have accurate clocks to hit their time slot.

The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server

I appreciate all the comments.
However, I think it is a no-brainer that for portable operation away from WiFi, the easiest (and most accurate) solution is to simply use a USB GPS.
I wasn't aware of the fact that this had been discussed before on here, but this is the way to go.

The usefulness is that it is not on a WWV frequency. Ergo, all "atomic" clocks & the like are still useless. Limiting to that, just use GPS or net time servers that have been around for quite a while.

Possible cottage industry to bloom is how to modify the existing "atomic" clocks to something in an unlicensed band or ham capable which is not on the books as yet, maybe. Time to be creative, leverage APRS some how?

FWIW, if you don't have access to net time or GPS clock, here's a manual way to set your clock based upon when everybody else starts transmitting.  It gets you close enough most of the time ===> http://vtenn.com/Blog/?p=1319#more-1319

neat!

I happened to remember little trick with the BKTimeSync software, and I'm guessing other sync software might have something similar.

With the BKTimeSync, you can change the seconds when the update (if needed) happens.

If an update happens during an FT8 transmission sequence, nothing will be decoded. If you allow it to update on the default :00 seconds, you may lose all the stations out of that time slot.

FT8 has 2.5 seconds of dead air at the end of each time slot... so set the software to update at :58 seconds, then it will update during the slack time.