Locality Switch

In radio, highly accurate clocks are a must have. You can’t run without one. Even being out by a second or two can make timing out to the news a nightmare. Luckily, it’s really easy to synchronise your computer’s clock with highly accurate internet clocks.

It all works with NTP, or Network Time Protocool. It’s basically a protocool which allows you to synchronise one computer’s clock with another (hopefully accurate!) one. There’s heaps of clocks to synchronise with, and the NTP Pool Project is where you can find the network addresses for these clocks.

Signing up to the NTP Pool to get your clock synced with is pretty easy, and just requires some basic registry editing. Windowsnetworking.com explains the registry settings for NTP clients, and once you get one machine setup it’s just a matter of adding the registry changes to your logon script (or doing it manually, if you so desire!).

However, if you want more control over your synchronisation, you may setup an internal time server of your own which all of your network machines sync to. In the Windows world (read: Active Directory), it’s just a matter of telling your Windows Server to sync to the NTP pool at a fairly regular interval (once an hour?), and then tell your clients to sync to your own Windows Server at a regular interval – it can all be set with some logon scripts.

The trick to this method if selecting a Stratum One or Stratum Two NTP server on the web, from the public list of NTP Project servers. The reason for this is so you get a steady and reliable time source, rather than just selecting one at random from the NTP Pool.