[Trlog] Serial Port Help Needed

[Jim Smith <jimsmith@shaw.ca>]

Hi everyone.

I'm trying to improve my station setup.

At the moment TR controls the MkV via COM1.

A separate computer controls the 706 at the Spotting position.

The two computers are networked via COM2.

Everything runs in a DOS box under Win98SE.

I want MORE.

I want to use the 706 as a 2nd radio for SO2R.

I want to feed spots from the net into the bandmap.  It is my 
understanding that to do this I need to feed the spots out of one serial 
port and back into a second one set up as the Packet Port.

I want to send commands to my rotator via the Rotator Port.

I want to hook up my PK-232 to the RTTY port.

I still want to be networked to a 2nd computer for whatever fun I can 
extract from a multi-2 operation.

I DON't want to be forever reaching behind the difficult-to-access 
computer to unplug and plug serial cables.

To do all this seems to require 7 COM ports, 6 of them running in a DOS box.

My computer has 2 COM ports - well it did but now it has 10 because I 
bought a ByteRunner 8 port PCI card.  It's got this really neat box you 
screw to the wall with 8 DB9 (or DB25 if you want) connectors on it and 
a cable which plugs into the card connector on the back of the 
computer.  The box has a Tx and Rx LED beside each of its 8 ports so you 
can see what's going on.  Hoo Boy - I can hardly wait to drag some of my 
buddies in here to impress the hell out of them.

The 8 port card seems to run FB under Win98SE.  (I put a loopback plug 
into one of the ports and Hyperterminal was able to talk to itself.)

I can't seem to get it to talk to the MkV from a DOS box.

For example, both Win98 Device Manager and a utility from ByteRunner 
(BR) tell me that the base address of the 1st port on the BR card (COM3) 
is hex 1000.  So, in Device Manager I set COM3 to 4800 8N2 to agree with 
the MkV CAT requirements.  

Then I start a DOS box and I put 1000 in the COM3 position in the BIOS 
Data Area ($40:04&05) using either DEBUG or SETCOMM.  TR PORT tells me 
that I got it right.  I set RADIO ONE CONTROL PORT to SERIAL 3 in 
logcfg.dat and I start TR.  (logcfg.dat also sets the RADIO NAME to COM3 
so I can see that TR did actually start from this logcfg.dat and not 
something else.)

What do I get?  A flashing Tx LED on the appropriate port on the BR box 
and nothing else.  i.e. the MkV, which is plugged into the port, doesn't 
seem to notice that it is being polled.

I played with the Xon/Xoff etc flow control stuff for COM3 in Device 
Manager.  Nothing I tried made any difference.  Given that TR doesn't 
use IRQs I thought the None choice for flow control might work.  Nope.

I CAN control the rig in Win98 with K6SE's MPFILTERS so that tells me 
that the BR box works, the cable is OK etc.

My next step is to connect (from a DOS box) one of the BR ports to a 2nd 
computer running DOS, run a DOS comm program on each (Telix) and see if 
they can talk to each other.  I did try the loopback plug but I'm no 
longer sufficiently familiar with Telix to be able to tell if I was just 
getting a local echo or if it was getting through.

I haven't tried TALK or RADIODEBUG yet.

In the meantime, I would really appreciate it if someone who has already 
been down this road would tell me how to get this thing working in a 
Win98 DOS box.  

Once I get it going I'll write up a procedure that any one can follow 
and post it.

73 es HNY de Jim Smith    VE7FO


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