[CQ-Contest] Computer Interfaces

[David Robbins]

not really.  why should i spend thousands of dollars to buy 7 new windoze or
other os compatible computers to run one application maybe a dozen weekends a
year and have to fight its instabilities and complexities when i can run a cheap
simple machine with a stable os and well proven software (386dx25, dos, and
ct)?  undoubtedly some day i will make the change, but not until some windoze
based product offers me something i can't get from the old dos based programs.

and don't think that the world of dos is dead outside of ham radio, a few weeks
ago i was given a brand new computer to evaluate, it was essentially a 386 with
a b/w lcd display (not even gray scale), running dos, its only external
interfaces were an ir serial port and a bar code scanner.. it is now part of a
service that the company i work for is selling.  on the x86/msdos platform it is
very easy to install ethernet, you can buy driver packages off the shelf that
give it most of the capability you would expect from a windowed system for file
transfer and remote access.  it is also fairly easy to customize your own
ethernet interface from public domain source code, see my nettsr for use with ct
as an example.

even though i run dos based logging computers, i would love to see a built in
ethernet interface to the radios.  if it could provide a built in web interface,
streaming audio, and a low level programmers interface it would be great.  none
of them would be a real breakthru in technology, they are all available with
basically off the shelf hardware today, a bit of programming of the interfaces
and they could be on the market.  what would be REAL nice (and probably
impossible) would be if there was a standard access protocol across
manufacturers.

Tony Field wrote:
> 
> It seems to me to be humorous that folks using "command line os's"
> (i.e. msdos low-tech and possibly others, circa 1980) are concerned
> with using USB (slow hi-tech) & Ethernet (fast hi-tech).  There should
> be a migration on the contesting software side to a more contemporary
> software platform.  Maybe then we can actually take significant
> advantage of the magic presented by USB (for radio control)  and/or
> Ethernet (for radio and station system control).
> 

-- 
David Robbins K1TTT
e-mail: mailto://k1ttt@berkshire.net
web: http://www.k1ttt.net
AR-Cluster node: 145.69MHz or telnet://k1ttt.net


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