Hi Peter, I have not had hardware RS232C ports for a number of years and have used the USB to RS232 adapters with some success. The main issue is having a driver from your OS for that particular adapter. Older legacy adapters may not have drivers.
There are newer adapters that work out the box with Vista ... just plug and play. This is easier than requiring installation of drivers from a disk which may be necessary with older OS's such as WinXP. I tend to look at this technology with public service/emergency use always in the back of my mind and ask the question, "Will this thing work if I don't have access to the internet or to special software installations?" I recently purchased a Tigertronics SignaLinkUSB interface which has the advantage of ease of installation for portable and emergency use since it gets audio lines and power from the USB port with one cable to the computer and then another cable to the rig. The built in sound card does seem to transmit quite a bit of noise ((sounds like computer leakage) but mine may be defective when you consider that one of the selling points is that it is supposed to have very clean audio. The keying time with the shortest delay adjustment is rated at 30 msec which seems to work OK for asynchronous ARQ. WinXP required some installation of drivers as it found the device. No installation disk was needed. Win98 would need the supplied disk with special drivers. Vista just works. As an experiment, I have been running tests with fldigi and other programs between two computers and two rigs here in the shack to learn more about the ARQ capabilities of the NBEMS suite. - The ICOM 756 Pro 2 uses the very low cost Unified Microsystems SCI-6 interface for audio lines and can key PTT through an optoisolator for programs that do not provide rig control. This requires a USB to RS-232C adapter. Then for rig control, I use the West Mountain RigTalk USB interface. If the program (e.g., fldigi) provides rig control, then you don't need the PTT control on the SCI-6 and avoids the need for a USB port for the adapter. - The ICOM IC-7000, which is intended more for portable deployment, is using the SignaLinkUSB without rig control. Both methods of interfacing seems to work well for the switching speeds we normally use for our multimode digital programs. It would be very difficult to work well with synchronous ARQ modes that have a short window, but anyone developing modern, ham friendly sound card ARQ modes would take that into consideration with todays computers and design accordingly. 73, Rick, KV9U Peter Frenning [OZ1PIF] wrote: > The real challenge is the advent of the "RS232 and Parallel port free" > PC. Either you have to add an external USB-> RS232 converter to your > cable-fest - and hope that's supported by your OS of choice (Vista and > Linux are the real show stoppers here) - or resort to the VOX > solution. A native USB-based solution - HW and/or SW - has not yet > emerged as far as I know >
