Whew! Since my last post on the Video Card and COM4, it appears
that more than a few Dragons were slain by the swords of the Mighty
Contesters. The score now is Contesters 1, the Confuser 0. I would
like to quote a well known contester, W3BGN (I was going to say
a famous contester but I think the correct term is Notorious), "You
have your competition down! Now is the time to kick him where it
really hurts!". Wipe that smile off of your face mates, the Confuser
Dragon has multiple heads. It is now time to focus on the Serial Ports.
First I have to give you a homework assignment. You thought that I
was going to do it all? Nope. It is time for you to get actively involved.
The assignment is to obtain the utility program named FINDIRQ. This
program was written by one of the PC Magazine DOS Garu's. It is
available on the CT-BBS in the files area and is called FINDIRQ.ZIP.
INTERNET Go to WW Web page at http://www.pcmag.com Choose
download from the navigation bar. Gives a listing of available files. Go
to it!
Most of you have computers that have two serial ports. In the older
computers you will usually find that the serial ports are on the IDE
hard drive controller card. There are manual jumpers on the card to
allow you to enable/disable each individual port and the jumpers offer
limited control over com1-4 etc. Also the LPT (printer) port is usually
on this card. Is this W3MM goof hinting that I may have to put my mitts
inside the confuser? At some point yes you will have to open up the
computer, add a card, or change settings. I suggest that you find the
instructions for this card. You may need them.
In newer computers the serial ports, lpt port, and IDE controller have
been incorporated directly on the motherboard. Control of the ports
is incorporated in the CMOS (BIOS) setup program. There are no manual
jumpers to play with.
Each serial port has a chip which is a UART. A what? A UART is a
Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter. Do you mean that my
computer has two transceivers built into it? Not quite. The UART is the
device that allows the serial port to communicate with a device such as
your TNC or radio. The UART sends data to the external device and
receives data back from the external device. Think of the UART as a
telephone. Wow! My computer has two telephones in it and I don't
have to pay Ma Bell a penny. Well after we complete the serial port
discussion you will find, depending on what you want to do, that you
may need 3 or even 4 telephones in your computer. Then we are going
to involve all of these telephones in a conference call so that we can
CONTEST!
All right! Here is your second home work assignment. This one is a
piece of cake. I am assuming that you are running DOS ver. 6.XX.
At the c:\ prompt type MSD and hit enter. When the screen comes
up click on com ports. The comports screen will be brought up. Look
at the last line and it will tell you what UART your serial ports have.
Write the chip number down for future reference. The reason will be
apparent when I provide further info.
This discussion will continue in the next post.
VY 73 de Dave W3MM w3mm@aol.com
>From Mr. Brett Graham" <bagraham@HK.Super.NET Sun Dec 17 00:33:08 1995
From: Mr. Brett Graham" <bagraham@HK.Super.NET (Mr. Brett Graham)
Subject: 14001 signal
Message-ID: <199512170033.IAA06506@is1.hk.super.net>
At 2343z 16 Dec, a carrier that I've noticed on 14001 for quite some time
now was a good S5. Unfortunately, with my 160m antenna up, I can't swing
the quad around to get a bearing on it. However, with a flux of 70,
A-index of 23 & a K of 2, on a band with no NA signals (or very few others,
for that matter), I'd reckon there's more than one transmitter site, or
it's running one helluva lotta gas!
73, VS6BrettGraham aka VR2BG bagraham@hk.super.net
|