The West Mountain interface, like most things they sell, tend to be some expensive but it is such a convenient form factor and eliminates the typical USB to COM serial adapter. Time Wave has a similar design at a similar price.
I have made a basic discrete transistor interface that you often see recommended but this requires a USB to COM adapter. The old Radio Shack product was overpriced at $40. The current USB to COM serial adapter at $28 seems very similar in appearance and description to the one that most everyone else sells for $15. Note: If you buy the blue no-name USB to serial adapter from New Egg/Donner, etc. You will not need to use the driver disk. In fact, it will kick the disk drawer open if you attempt to use it. Instead, Vista has out of the box built in drivers and is plug and play. Donner notes that one of their customers indicated it worked with Vista. That was likely from my comments to Mrs. D a few weeks ago. Now if only Vista would not crash from running DX Lab! If only Linux had the drivers to work well with my Samsung 22" monitor, I would either dump Vista on my new HP AMD Athlon computer or maybe run it dual boot for a while. Meanwhile I have my "old" emachines back on running XP and had to dump Linux since it never could work with the widescreen. Frustrating to have two OS's that just can not quite make it compared to XP. QST had a very interesting article recently that showed how easy it was to make an interface directly from USB to CI-V. The only components that are available for this are SMT form factor so that does make it more difficult to work with. I wonder if the West Mountain product is close to this design, if not exactly the same? 73, Rick, KV9U Tony wrote: > All: > > Does anyone know of a cheap USB rig control > interface for Icom? Westmountain Radio makes the > Rigtalk > http://www.westmountainradio.com/RIGtalk.htm but > it seems a bit pricy at $60 bucks... > > Tony KT2Q > >
