My answers inserted after the questions:
> A few questions to those of you who own this device and have used it for
> two-radio contest operation:
>
> 1. Do you like it? Would you buy it again?
Yes -- I bought two. I had occasional troubles with broken CW keying
before. Since my PC is used for a lot of things besides ham radio I could
not take the approach of disconnecting hardware and stopping services to fix
it. This board solved the problem.
> 2. Any difficulties getting it built and working? How much time did it
take?
Only difficulty was that the silk-screen image of the three transistors is
backwards. It took maybe an hour or two to build. No big deal.
> 3. How did you get the parts - straight from DigiKey? Any parts hard to
get?
All parts except the specified optocouplers in stock at Digikey. Wayne has
specified on this list acceptable replacements for the optocouplers. They
are readily available from Digikey.
> How much did it end up costing for the whole thing?
First one I built with sockets for every chip. Sockets cost more than the
chips. Total cost around $40 each not including the PIC chip and the
board.
> 4. What kind of enclosure did you use?
That I am not happy about. The board was apparently not designed for any
particular enclosure and when I asked the writelog folks what they'd
recommend, I didn't receive a reply. Because of connectors front, back,
and one side, it doesn't readily adapt to any enclosure I found, although I
didn't spend a lot of time looking.
>From previous posts on here it appears that a variety of enclosures were
used. I finally just mounted the board in a larger enclosure, mounted the
necessary connectors on the enclosure, and connected them to the board.
Kind of a waste as the board-mounted connectors were not cheap. Unless you
find a way to use the connectors on the board, don't buy them.
> 5. What do you like/not like?
I use Windows NT and Windows 2000. On those o/s, the LPT port on the PC is
not supported for Writelog use so no band information is available to
control automated antenna switching. The W5XD+ keyer fixes this by
providing the same thing for two radios.
The keyer seems to key with higher weight than the keyer in my radio. I'm
going to set up a scope when I get energetic and check this out. If so, it
can be changed with INI options.
> 6. Any other comments?
If you use one of the RS232 to rig interfaces that is powered by the serial
port (fairly common with Icom), you cannot use it with the W5XD board
wihtout modifying the W5XD board since both DTR and RTS are used for the
signaling to the PIC chip on the board. The mod is trivial and I can supply
details if you need it.
73,
Mike WA0SXV
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