[RTTY] USB Dongle Sound Cards

[Kok Chen]

On Dec 11, 2012, at 2:06 PM, Gedking at aol.com wrote:

> Just what does a Dongle do???

I think he means a small external USB Sound Card.

Dongles used to mean something proprietary (but moderately inexpensive to manufacture) that you attach to the computer's serial or parallel port, without which a piece of (expensive) software that keys to it would not run -- a way for developers to keep people from pirating software.  If K6STI had shipped a dongle with RITTY, he could still be publishing ham software today (or at least the pirates would need to reverse engineer the dongle :-). 

Common usage of "dingle" nowadays seems to be any small device that you plug into a computer.

Some of the cheap "sound cards" out there are no larger than a small USB memory stick.  

73
Chen, W7AY