[time-nuts] Can anyone help?

[Didier Juges]

Poul-Henning Kamp may weigh in with his valuable expertise, but I 
believe the ntp standard offers the capability for the clients (your 
computer's operating system) to compensate for the time it takes for the 
ntp info to get to you. This assumes that the delay from you to the ntp 
server is the same as the delay from the ntp server to you, which is not 
always a correct assumption, but seems to work pretty good in most cases 
(within the range John cited).

Some ISPs over here in the USA run their own ntp server, and sometimes 
those are made available to the customers. You may ask if your ISP 
offers this service, or if they know of an ntp server that's easy to get 
to from your location.

Didier KO4BB
.

John Ackermann N8UR wrote:
> Hi Paul --
>
> You can go down as deep a rathole with internet timing as we do with
> atomic clocks :-), but in very gross terms if your computer is running
> the "NTP" time daemon you can keep time to better than 100ms pretty
> easily.  With a broadband connection and good choice of servers, a few
> milliseconds is possible.
>
> Earlier versions of Windows did not have a good timekeeping system, but
> I understand that the latest service pack of XP is much improved; I
> don't know how it compares with the "real" NTP program though.
>
> John
> ----
>
> ABSA Email said the following on 10/28/2006 12:32 PM:
>   
>> Hi there,
>> I need some advice.
>> I'm not into the nano-second accuracy region, so this could well be
>> considered OT.
>>
>> 1. I have a Gent's mechanical clock, and I check it by my computer clock. To
>> set the computer clock, I use the built-in synchronisation to
>> time.windows.com, or time.nist.gov.  How accurate can this be by the time
>> that the synchronising signal reaches my computer in South Africa?  Are
>> there any time stations nearer to me than USA? Does the time signal update
>> itself as it travels the Internet to me?
>>
>> 2. This is for frequency measurement. Can anyone recommend a divide-by-ten
>> counter to use as a pre-scaler up to 500 MHZ?
>>
>>
>>
>> Paul Galpin
>> South Africa
>>
>>