George wrote:
> Jim,
>
> Choppy cw has always been a problem with WL as far as I know. It happens
> with cw keying on both serial port and lpt ports. I believe it is
> associated
> with the cpu being "overloaded" by too many processes requiring cpu cycles
> simultaneously. You can reduce the occurrence of choppy cw by shutting down
> any
> programs that are running concurrently with WL, such as virus checking
> software, but you will probably not eliminate the problem altogether.
>
...snip...
>
> 73, Geo...k5kg
I have been using LPT1 keying on WL for years. I never get choppy CW. The
secret? Turn off your screen savers, leave windows with the default (plain
jane) desktop format. Turn off all battery savers, disk spin-down
contraptions, everything. Any gismo running on your desktop that has a timer
is going to cause problems. If you are busy with the contest, you shouldn't be
expecting your screen to go into 'save' mode anyway. The interrupts related to
those contraptions will distract the processor 'mid-stream' in a CW sending
situation. Some interrupt timer goes off and the processor has to check to see
if the disk should get spun down, or whether it is leap year, or midnight of
daylight savings, or whatever. Turn off all that worthless crap and you will
be fine.
We tried XP machines using serial port/USB converters this past weekend and got
lots of complaints from the ops about "runaway keying". George suggests the
MicroHam gismos. We had Ralph-K0IR here this past weekend. They used those
$99 MicroHam USB port boxes at PeterI and just loved them. It may be the only
way to go if you intend to keep WL as the log of choice.
We have decided to abandon WL for good. As far as we can see, there is nobody
doing any serious development that will support M/M ops. Stand alone may be
fine, but M/M and network support is all but completely busted. Sad day
frankly... We lost hundreds of Qs due to WL network snaffus last weekend. I
managed to find 170Qs on one laptop in a file that had been misnamed after a
reboot due to "WL needs to shut down" message. It was a complete fluke that we
found those. Hundreds more were placed in correctly named files and are now
gone for good. Never again!
Ford-N0FP
ford@cmgate.com
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