Almost every laptop I have looked at in the last year has a firewire connector. Many desktops as well. It is the future (for now).
Some vendors may wish firewire would go away, but many PC users with that Apple would go away. To be fair, many Apple users wish that PCs would go away. I wish I could buy a good SDR for $100. All the above have about the same chances of becoming true. For higher-speed, reliable data transfer, IEEE-1394 (firewire) is the way to go. NO enumeration issues. No virtual-comm port kludges. Faster than USB, period. Having said all that, I am using USB, as firewire is too expensive to play with as a hobby. Good choice by Flex. They went from a parallel port, that was on its way out when the SR-1000 was released, to firewire, which will support even faster data transfer rates in the future. I never understood the parallel port usage back then, and thought USB should have been used for the SDR-1000 (this from someone who used to program parallel port bits in DOS, and CP/M before that). Jump right over USB for the 5000. Terry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter G. Viscarola" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <flexradio@flex-radio.biz> Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 10:27 PM Subject: Re: [Flexradio] fire/usb > I thought the choice of 1394 was odd, as well. > > I know several vendors that have been trying to MAKE Firewire go away, > and who WISH it would go away, even going so far as to threaten dropping > support for it. Do you see 1394 ship "in box" in many PCs or laptops? > Not so much. Heck, even the IPod uses USB. > > Add to this the fact that 1394 host controllers vary widely in quality > and interoperability. > > A USB-bus can provide bandwidth reservation and isochronous transfers, > so thus is very reasonable even for high-bandwidth audio data. > > About the only place where 1394 excels over USB is when you need the > ability to distribute "ownership" of the bus -- a USB bus has one master > but a Firewire bus is effectively peer-to-peer. When you need that type > of distributed control, 1394 is the right choice. But I don't really see > why that would be important between the host and the radio... > > Mayhaps our friends from Flex can enlighten us as to their thinking... > just out of curiousity. > > de Peter K1PGV > > > _______________________________________________ > FlexRadio mailing list > FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz > http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz > Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ > FlexRadio Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ > FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/ > > _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
