I run KStars/Ekos/Indi all on a Raspberrry PI (in fact, running StellarmateOS on it). I typically image at home, but recently went to the GSSP star party goldenstatestarparty.org/ which was great, but a remote site. In all cases where you drive 6 hours to setup your telescope, something is bound to go wrong. Here's what happened to me:

In my case, all worked except for plate solving (the alignment module would not figure out the coordinates of the image taken). It took a while, but I finally tracked this down to "the computer had the wrong date and time". It was 2.5 days off. I guess the Raspberry Pi doesn't keep the time, and when I image at home it picks up the time from my network, but when I imaged remotely, perhaps it used last time it was running? Once I realized what the issue was (an hour later), a quick 'sudo date -s "month/day/year hour:minute"' worked and all was good. Of course, from now on, when I image remotely, I'll check and set the time at boot.

My suggestion:

It would be great to detect when the system time/date is unreliable. KStars/Ekos could warn on that, as I imagine I'm not the only one who's had this happen to them.
I would think the OS "knows" if it have gotten the time from the network, or if it's just relying on the last time saved from the last time the OS ran (which would be unreliable).
I don't know if the OS releases this type of info.

Thanks for listening,
Hy

This is why I use RTC in the StellarMate units that I ship. It keeps the time until SM has access to the internet (or GPS). But if you use SM App, it would sync both location and time of your StellarMate OS (assuming 1.4.2+) including the "computer time" every time you login to the app to use SM.

I see--good idea on the RTC. I'll get one.

Re the stellarmate app, I hadn't previously really seen a reason to use the app--but I admit I hadn't really checked it out.
I typically use a laptop, but when camping have used a VNC app to check-up on progress from inside my tent.
Perhaps this is it. I'll check it out.

BTW, if/when I manually "sudo date -s ..." and/or set the lat/lon in the indi eqmod tab, I've been restarting indi/ekos/kstars as a precaution.
Do I need to restart the software when reset the date and/or location?

Thanks,
Hy

If INDI is _already_ running, then it's probably a good idea to restart. If not, then no need to restart KStars.

Another possibility is to set up your phone as a WiFi hot spot and configue your RPi to connect to that. Then you have a connection to the internet to get time. You need a working mobile connection of course.