[RTTY] Com ports

[Sante - IK0HBN]

Hi Phil,
before my mother board got burned about 6 months ago, leaving me without 
logging and Rtty, I had an ISA 2 ports serial board with also an LPT that I 
set to LPT2. Now I purchased a modern MB by EPOX without the chance of 
having ISA slot's. So my old ISA serial card went retired in a box. The new 
board I spoke in my last message shares IRQ stealing only one to the 
system. Now I have 10 COM's....sure more I need....
Hope this helps.
PS. I preferred to put my hands in advance...so I bought one 8 port card, 
but MOXA sells also one model SMARTIO with only 4 ports..sure cheaper. They 
have also a box which protects card and computer from spikes, surges and so on.

At 21.16 08/07/2002 +0100, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>Well, yet another simple question has brought out loads of ideas and
>thoughts!
>I am still a bit puzzled, though, and will continue to watch, and hopefully
>learn.
>
>When I put my last shack PC together, I had to go and disable the BIOS
>function on IRQ's, so that I could manually set which COM port went where.
>Now that I have the new one, I accidentally left the BIOS function alone,
>and only realised what I had done when I saw that COM 3 & 4 were sharing the
>same IRQ's as COM 1 & 2.
>
>I couldn't let this remain, simply because I have the dx cluster, PTT
>control, and also FSK to consider. There were no two options that could
>possibly share in this case, so I had to find a "free" IRQ.
>
>Also, these extra COM ports are not Plug & Play, so I had to do a search for
>non P&P stuff, which in turn found IRQ Steering. I'm not sure this was a
>good thing, as a couple of IRQ were reserved for this, although I have
>subsequently found that I can "share" such IRQ's quite happily.
>
>I am also intrigued by Sante's solution too! A friend of mine has told me
>about a similar card he got for his PC, and it only has one IRQ.
>Now, this is where I show up as being thick! Just how can you get a card
>that has all these COM ports, but is able to share a single IRQ? Is there
>some onboard software that controls the ports, and thus controls the IRQ? If
>so, how come it doesn't end up causing a crash?
>
>Sante also mentioned soundcards, and it I use an old ISA Soundblaster 16,
>which works fine.
>
>This is getting to be an interesting thread, and I am willing to bet there
>are more "solutions" to this than meets the eye!
>
>73 for now,
>Phil GU0SUP
>
>
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