N3BKV’s Ham Radio Hacks

  Often when I decide to do Parks on the Air (POTA), I just grab my gear and go forgetting to sync my laptop’s time.  When I get to the park, sometimes my system clock is 5-30 seconds off which means I’m not able to do FT8. I have found some inexpensive solutions to help fix this issue.  First, you’ll need a GPS dongle to capture accurate time signals.  These dongles are great and can get time almost anywhere, if they have a good view of the sky.  Here is the one I like since I can move it around if I need to and can keep it away from my radio to reduce RFI. It is called the “VFAN USB GPS Receiver Antenna Gmouse for Laptop PC Car Marine Navigation Magnetic Base” and available on Amazon for $20.  If you want something less expensive ($12) and smaller, I’ve heard good things about this unit (although I have never used it) – “HiLetgo VK172 G-Mouse USB GPS/GLONASS USB GPS Receiver for Windows 10/8/7/VISTA/XP”. Next, you’ll need software to allow your computer t...

  I have many clocks in my home which all seem to show different time no matter how often I try to sync them to an accurate time source.  I was looking for something inexpensive that I could have in the living room that would auto correct itself often so I had one clock I could depend on there.   I decided to stay away from radio clocks that needed to be able to receive WWV to reset themselves as I knew that would work maybe once a week, if I was lucky. I used to have a WWV correcting watch and I had to remember to put by a window at night to get updates. Ideally, I wanted something that would reset hourly so it could be accurate to within a second or two.   After searching around, I found this clock on Amazon and thought I’d give it a try.  It can be set to synchronize over wifi with any time server worldwide or even a local one if you have your own NTP server. It is customizable via a web browser to display any time zone (including UTC – great for lo...