[ct-user] New Computer

[Ron Stordahl]

Richard

Have been experimenting on this very thing and here is what I have found
out.

1)  I recommend the PCI cards from ByteRunner   http://www.byterunner.com/
Others might be fine, I just have no experience with others.

Specifically I am using the PCI-210-5-2 which costs $70.00 plus shipping.
It will give you 2 serial and 1 parallel ports.  And it will take just 1
IRQ, in my case it uses IRQ 5.  Stay away from ISA cards!!  ISA slots are
going away, soon new computers will not even have a single ISA slot.

This card was plug and play, and it worked.  Installation was easy.  Since
my computer had built in 2 serial and 1 parallel,using IRQ's 3,4 and 7, as
is still standard, with this I have 4 serial and 2 parallel ports plus I
also have a PCI modem card which calls itself COM3 and uses IRQ 9.  Thus I
now have COM1,2,3,4,5 and LPT1,2 and they all work.  And I still have IRQ 11
unused! I also have a sound card in the system.

An alternative would be the PCI-400-5-4 which is a 4 serial card for $116.00
plus shipping.  When I ordered the 2 serial/1 parallel card I was working
under the impression that I would need the parallel port for CW keying, but
I see that DX4Win will use a serial port for CW keying, in fact a single
serial port will both control your radio frequency and do the CW keying,
using the DTR line for keying.  Had I realized this I would probably have
gone the 4 serial port card way.  In that case I would have had
COM1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and LPT1.

Its good to have an extra COM port, if you are going to connect a TNC for
packet cluster and another TNC for a RTTY/Packet/Pactor port etc AND when
you go to Windows really you should put out about $150.00 for a good UPS.
The UPS also uses a serial port to tell your computer to shut down
gracefully during an extended power outage.  If you just drop power to a
Windows98 machine you can corrupt the disk.

As to using CT with Windows98, I have had difficulty with I/O.  I don't
think COMTSR really works correctly in a DOS window.  But some folks say
that they have done so.  I am hoping that CT for Windows comes out soon,
otherwise I might have to jump ship to WriteLog which is a windows program.

I would be surprised if the DVP card will work with Windows, unless someone
has written a Windows driver.

By the way there are people who are running Windows98 by circumventing the
graphical interface and going right to the DOS prompt, but if you do that
you will lose the multitasking capabilities.  You might as well just run old
DOS 6.22 and forget Windows98 entirely if thats the route you wish to take.

One warning---Since Windows98 is multitasking, the operating system divides
its resources between several processes.  When you are generating CW, you
will notice the code is less than perfect.  This is because Windows cannot
give full attention to this task, it gets interupted and dots and dashes get
truncated, or even extended.  Its pretty annoying, particularly if you have
a slow processor.  The solution to this will be for someone to build an
RS232 based keyer with all the functionally required to work smoothly with
logging and contest programs.

One more comment.  I am posting this with Outlook Express in plain text
mode, letting it wrap at 76 characters.  So if my posting is a mess, Ill
have to figure out a wrap length which doesn't create havoc for future
postings.

Ron N5IN










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