At 02:50 PM 9/30/2007, Alan P. Biddle wrote:
... My own solution is to spend a few bucks and get a copy of Instantrack from AMSAT. It is a bulletproof program, easy to configure, and easy to check whether you are using the keps you think you are. It doesn't work well in real time mode within Windows because of RT clock issues, but it works fine for pass prediction, and allows you to break the tie between the other two programs.
Dear friends,
Just a note. I am also a big fan of InstantTrack and have tested it under most versions of Windows including XP but not Vista. It actually does work well in real-time tracking modes under Windows as long as you run it in Full-Screen mode.
This is due to the way that the MS DOS emulator for Windows was designed. It does not implement the real-time clock tick interrupt correctly and loses lots of ticks except when it is in full-screen mode. This has been true of every version of Windows back to 3.0 probably because the old cpus couldn't keep up and the guys in Redmond never re-wrote it for the newer cpus that could easily handle it.
As long as you use full-screen mode, you can also run radio tuning and rotor tracking in real-time and even quit InstantTrack to run a DOS program in the foreground with tuning and tracking still running in the background.
There are other DOS environments for Windows including open-source versions such as DOSBox so an ambitious programmer could fix this problem...
73, Tony AA2TX