Spectrum Lab Waterfall timestamp out of sync

[badger111]

I've noticed that my waterfall timestamps drift off (badly) after starting Spectrum lab. Has anyone else come across this?

[The Admiral]

I've seen the timestamp out by 1 hour, but I can't remember now how to resolve that. What exactly do youmean by "drift"? Do you mean the disparity is changing, or that it is just "out"?

[The Admiral]

Incidentally, are you using the latest version of SL? It's very recent and it may be a bug. Looking at your screenshot, it's interesting that one of tick boxes refers to a test but with drifting time.

[badger111]

When I start SL, the time in the waterfall matches my system time; by the time the first "dotted" line gets to the bottom of my screen, the new line at the top is a minute or so "slow" (compared to my system time) - the time in the dialog you can see in that screenshot remains correct!

I've got another machine I run SL on to test scripts. It has the same settings and yet the waterfall remains "in-sync".

I have looked at (and will continue to research) the "Primary Time source" options in the settings as that makes some sort of sense (although first thoughts are that this is for correcting time differences in the millisecond ranges)...

[badger111]

Incidentally, are you using the latest version of SL? It's very recent and it may be a bug. Looking at your screenshot, it's interesting that one of tick boxes refers to a test but with drifting time.

I'm using version 2.4.0.31

[The Admiral]

That's pretty ancient, 2004 I believe. You could try updating to the latest version, 2.82.b05, here: http://www.qsl.net/dl4yhf/speclab/install_speclab.zip and seeing if the problem persists. There would have been a lot of changes and bug fixes in that time. Not to mention updates to the OS.

Ian

PS If you spent a while configuring SL to how you like it, I suggest that you save the configuration file prior to updating, and then re-load afterwards.

[badger111]

That's pretty ancient, 2004 I believe. You could try updating to the latest version, 2.82.b05, here: http://www.qsl.net/dl4yhf/speclab/install_speclab.zip and seeing if the problem persists. There would have been a lot of changes and bug fixes in that time. Not to mention updates to the OS.

Ian

PS If you spent a while configuring SL to how you like it, I suggest that you save the configuration file prior to updating, and then re-load afterwards.

I just checked and the version number I gave was the .exe file version, which, apparently, is SL version 2.82 b05.

I also played around with the "Primary" time source settings and it made no difference either. Hmmmm mmmm!

[The Admiral]

Ah, OK. The version number is shown on the header when it's running. Other than that, I can't help I'm afraid. Are the 2 versions running on the same OS?

Ian

Edit. My file is just called "InstallSpecLab.exe". I can't see an exe file version.

[badger111]

Ah, OK. The version number is shown on the header when it's running. Other than that, I can't help I'm afraid. Are the 2 versions running on the same OS?

Ian

The "Live" one, with the issue, is running on Vista 32 bit (because I couldn't get Colorgramme running on my 64bit Win 8 machine properly).

I've requested to join the SL user group on Yahoo (which the author of SL suggests you do if you have any "issues") and await their response...

Lee

[The Admiral]

I've found the conversations on there tend to be on another planet, but I guess it depends on how 'techie' one is! Hopefully they'll steer you in the right direction. I've posted queries on there and one usually gets an answer.

Ian

[SteveNickolls]

Hi Lee,

You can get the two times that are 1 hour apart corrected by unticking the box which says "get time zone information from system".  I think it is to do with GMT being +1 now. As to the time stamp becoming out of sync I wonder if it is your sound card or the sampling rate from it? In System/Timer Calibration there is the authors note that, "These controls were used for experimental purposes in July 2014, in an attempt to make timestamps more accurate (better than a few seconds). It later turned out to be impossible to achieve this on a "normal" Win XP platform, because the timers provided by the API exhibit a strong jitter, depending on the CPU load. The only "good" timebase proved to be the sampling rate of the soundcard-so select the audio sampling clock as the time source!" If you have two computers one sound card might be ok with SL the other not? Worth also checking all the sampling details are ok too as you need a certain sampling rate (192,000) for SL. I also note that your screen shot shows a message about output device not being recognised.

Hope you can get this rectified Lee.

Cheers,

Steve

[badger111]

Well, I tried a few suggestions from the Yahoo SL users group and none worked, so I turned of the timegrid (problem solved (sort of));