KStars is extremely unreliable at timekeeping. I have been using Ekos for scheduling and countless times I have found it starts the schedule a hour or two late because KStars has lost the plot and is running way behind real time. This can happen even it was synchronised the night before.

I find this behaviour strange and antiquated. I'm running on a Mac. Macs, like pretty well all modern computers, including R-Pi, use NTP and have timekeeping as good as necessary.

Every other planetarium program I've used uses the computer time to generate its internal time. KStars seems not to, having something like a water-clock, or worse, inside. In its preferences there is the option to have KStars tell the mount what time it is, or the mount tell KStars, or have both controlled by GPS (see below).

Why not NTP or the computer's clock ??

As for GPS -- hah! I have a rack-mounted, GPS-based NTP server in the observatory. As well as NTP services it provides a serial line with NMEA sentences. Neither of these work with any of the 3 INDI GPS devices. I've bought a couple of GPS-USB dongles (U-Blox, a well known brand) and they don't work with INDI either.

The only use case I've seen for INDI GPS devices is a bizarre concept of converting a mobile phone into a wifi-based NMEA source. This is a desperate solution when there are cheap, handheld GPS receivers with hardwired NMEA output. Not to mention other permanent solutions. Why are these hardwired NMEA connections not supported?

Sorry to be grumpy, but I'm a bit fed up with this pathetic timekeeping.

Richard

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