[CQ-Contest] Contesting Computer

[David A. Pruett]

At 09:48 AM 11/25/03 -0600, Bob Naumann - N5NJ wrote:
> >>Motherboard must have one ISA slot. It can still be done.
>Byterunner 4 com port ISA Board, uses one shared IRQ.
>
>Not in CT it won't.
>
>CT still requires unique IRQ's.

I was going to make this comment, but Bob took care of it.

We ran into this with our recent CQWW SSB trip to VE1JF, where we took a 
pair of small Acer P-233 desktops for logging.  These computers have only 
one serial port, one ISA slot and one PCI slot.  Since this was a phone 
contest, we wanted to use the ISA slot for the W9XT Contest Card voice keyers.

For some time, I've had these computers equipped with a SiiG single COM PCI 
card in the PCI slot.  While these are PnP (plug-and-play) cards, SiiG 
provides a utility which you launch in AUTOEXEC.BAT which sets up the 
card.  These work perfectly under DOS using IRQ11.

The problem comes when you need two COM ports, like we needed at VE1JF (the 
third COM to feed spots into from WinTelNetX).  I mail-ordered a dual COM 
SiiG card, which set up just like my single COM card, and it indeed worked 
fine under DOS *as long as you only ran one COM port*.  Reading the docs 
revealed that the single IRQ was shared between the COM ports.  No amount 
of fiddling on my part could make both COM ports work.

I searched the web pretty thoroughly for a PCI dual COM card, and every 
single one that I could find shares an IRQ.  I finally gave up and dug thru 
my assortment of old expansion cards and found an old ISA card that I could 
address as COM 3 & 4 with unique IRQs, but then we had to resort to an 
outboard voice keyer.

Sharing IRQs is usually no problem while running PnP cards under Windows, 
so most any Windows logging program should be set.  Under DOS, it's a 
different matter.  CT and NA both require unique IRQs for each COM port.  I 
believe TRLog is different - the last time I talked to Tree about it, he 
said TRLog "polls" the COM ports and hence require no IRQ at all.  In 
almost any case I can think of, if the program does not use an IRQ for the 
COM port, then sharing them is not an issue.

YMMV

73,

Dave/K8CC