This has come up before and this was the answer given by Bob McGwier one of the SDR programmers, quoted below.
I personally switched to the Eltima VSP and have had no troubles since, it's been about 2 months now. "vCom has served us very well indeed thanks to Phil and as always, the price was indeed right. Many experience drop outs of the serial lines between your external programs and the PowerSDR. I have looked for an alternative to vCom for quite a while that might fix this issue since I could monitor ports and see that all applications were still talking and that the vCom ports were becoming black holes. Closing and opening fixed the problem but this is not an acceptable solution. For those of you who are new to PowerSDR and Flex radio, there are no wires between your logging and rotor and contesting programs and the radio. It is done VIRTUALLY inside the computer. The virtual glue we have been using is vCom. I am recommending an alternative, VSPD, if you find yourself having trouble with vCom. Unfortunately, there is no really usable free alternative I can find. Development on all of this was stymied when we were going to move to Visual Studio > 2005 and .NET 2.0 but developmental delays have prevented this. I want every SDR-1000 and Flex 5000 to have the best possible experience with their radio so I wish to recommend an alternative that is NOT free. You can download it and try it for 14 days and prove to yourself that you no longer have drop outs. http://www.eltima.com/products/vspdxp/ http://www.eltima.com/de/products/vspdxp/ I recommend if you download the trial version, you unload vCom (this is easy) and load this as a replacement for the fourteen days it is free to use. Unlike VAC, it will not start shouting by me now but will just say "it is time for you to purchase" when you try to open the control panel. I have run this product now for two months since it was recommended to me by someone here to try. I believe that was Ken, N9VV, but I am uncertain. If it was Ken, thank you, if it was not Ken, my apologies for not writing down who it was. Here are the things I do know. I have not had a virtual serial port drop out in two months. I have not had the occasional other problems that I believe were associated with vCom. The product is not cheap. It is a flat $100.00 for a single copy. If 21 of you band together, it is $50.00 each. I can recommend it as wonderfully easy to use, as easy as vCom. The GUI is no more functional that vCom but VSPD has more capabilities than vCom which you can find out by trying it yourself for a free 14 day trial. I spent the $100 to make sure it was sound before I recommended it. I can. 73's Bob N4HY" -- AMSAT Director and VP Engineering. Member: ARRL, AMSAT-DL, TAPR, Packrats, NJQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC. ARRL SDR WG Chair "If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up." Hunter S. Thompson" Ray Andrews, K9DUR wrote: > Peter, > > This is a common problem that nobody has been able to track down a cause > for. > > To recover, open the Setup window on PowerSDR & click on the "CAT Control" > tab. Uncheck the "Enable CAT" box & then check it again. All will be well > for a while. > > I am running both N1MM Logger & Ham Radio Deluxe (not at the same time) with > my SDR-1000. If I leave PowerSDR running (which is my normal state), > occasionally either program will fail to communicate with PowerSDR. > Disabling & re-enabling CAT control always fixes the problem. > > 73, Ray, K9DUR > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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/
