Hi Peter, The Prolific company seems to make a very large number of these adapters that are then branded with different companies names. The old (large and expensive) Radio Shack USB adapter (about $40 here in the U.S.) was from this company. I am sure these products are available world wide.
The older adapters may not have new drivers developed for Vista, but when I purchased a recent design, that has the electronics built in to the 9 pin connector, it came with a mini disk with drivers. This worked FB for XP, but when I tried to use it for Vista, the computer would reject the attempt to load the disk. I was quite concerned at first, until I realized that Vista automatically identifies this product and no driver is even needed. One of the nice features of Vista that at least some may not be aware. This adapter cost me around $20 including shipping. I have seen them advertised for as low as $12 plus shipping and are much better for portability. Some of them may have very short cables, barely over a foot long, so for rig control you will likely need a few additional feet of extension cable for the RS-232 side. I think that Linux also supports many of these adapters, but I currently removed Linux yet again from my computers as it just can not compete with XP for practical use with ham programs, and definitely can not compete with Vista when it comes to the highest quality font and image rendering on my systems. Incidentally, I burnedan iso from the new OpenSolaris Live and that seemed much better than Linux variants in terms of image quality. Even could handle my high end HP tower with Nvidia chipset. But then again, the problem is that I could not run my ham software, which is something I am really not willing to give up. 73, Rick, KV9U Peter Frenning [OZ1PIF] wrote: > My new LapTop (Zepto 6625WD), like most new ones, has no RS232 port, so, > in order to PTT my radio (FT-847 - no VOX!), I need an USB to RS232 > adapter. The one I have (Belkin F5U103V) has no Vista 64bit support (no > drivers available and none planned that I know of). Anybody in similar > jam with a tested solution? It wouldn't hurt if was also supported by > Ubuntu Linux either. > >
