[RTTY] USB to Serial Port Adapter

[Scott Keating]

Brian:

	I use a USB/serial adapter on my laptop in the airplane to drive the
radio PTT while the built-in serial port receives GPS data.  I'm looking at
new laptops and never considered multiple USB adapters may not work so I'm
interested in knowing more about that myself!

	On your other question - I use a cheap USB/serial adapter (from
PCcables.com) with both my desktop and laptop.  My desktop has multiple USB
ports and the adapter will always show up as COM6 (my specification) no
matter what port I use.  I hope that's the info you were looking for.

	There is at least one other non-USB alternative that you might
consider: Socket Communications makes several, I have a single-port card now
that works great, but they make dual and quad cards also.  Their cards are
quite a bit more money than going the USB route, but on the positive side
all the software I've thrown at it sees the Socket card as a traditional
built-in serial port.

73 - Scott, N4GVA


--
-----Original Message-----
From: rtty-bounces at contesting.com [mailto:rtty-bounces at contesting.com] On
Behalf Of Brian Spindor
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2004 10:10 PM
To: RTTY at contesting.com
Subject: [RTTY] USB to Serial Port Adapter

To the group:
I know this may be a little off subject but I'm preparing to set up my
station again after moving home.  I was planning on switching from my tower
computer to my laptop computer as the station computer.  The laptop has only
USB ports while my 570D and Rigblaster have 9 pin serial ports. My first
thought was to go get two of the cheap USB to Serial Port adapters and use
them together to drive the Rigblaster and the 570D.  I'm told that you
cannot use more than one of the cheap USB to serial Port adapters at a time
and further more if you plug the cheap adapter into another USB port it will
assign a different COM Port number to the same adapter.  My next thought was
to look for something that allowed multiple ports and had static COM Port
numbers assigned to each COM Port connection.  I managed to find at least
two vendors:  CompUSB and Sealevel.  With prices ranging from $100 to $160
I'm just a bit skeptical.

Can someone tell me if I'm on track with the advice that I cannot use more
than one of the cheap adapters and will the port numbers change if I put the
adapter into a different USB port.  Is there another way around this
problem?

Thanks in advance
Brian Spindor
KA7KUZ
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