writes: A good part of that text attributed to me was in fact from the original poster... >But it is harder to keep the instantaneous frequency in control. >At least, our old 68331 based product was cursed by or Network Time >Protocol wizards as being the only box whose timer (based on 32768 >Hz crystal) wasn't stable enough to be a credible NTP system >I thought the Motorolas had a way to route the 32 KHz crystal directly to >a timer module to keep time-of-day. It's been a while since I looked at >one though. If the thing isn't keeping good time at all most likely it's >the 32768 crystal or oscillator that's at fault, not the multiplication. Understand that NTP attempts to keep clocks across a network synchronized to within 10s of microseconds by doing magic based on measured network round trip times and such. It's quite possible that a lack of "instantaneous frequency countrol" could render such a scheme unworkable. It's also possible that a "cheap watch crystal" was used and it simply lacked the frequency stability of the "oscillator in a can" type devices used in our other products. BillW