[WriteLog] Ports

[Ron Stordahl]

It's quite common for only a single com port to be brought out to the rear
of the machine.  In many cases the second com port is on the board in for
form of a 2 by 5 pin connector.  Unfortunately there are two different
wiring standards for these connectors as com.  Some use 1 to 1, 2 to 2, 3 to
3....9 to 9.  Others use 1 to 1, 2 to 6, 3 to 2, 4 to 7...9 to 9.  The
former is called an INTEL cable, the later a DTK cable.  But there is the
rare Intel board which uses the DTK cable just to confuse things.

All modern machines have the connectors in a group on the board accessible
through an i/o panel for which there are cutouts on the rear of the machine.
This includes com, parallel, usb, audio and for low end machines built in
video.  If the machine has built in video, then the video connector takes
the place of one of the com connectors.  Its in this case when you can
sometimes find the on board block for com2 I described above.

But even if you have 2 com ports, its not enough.  I suggest using the 2 and
4 port PCI cards from byterunner.com.  They have never disappointed me.
They present no difficulties with IRQ's.  As a test I put two of them in my
ham machine, giving me 10 com ports, and tested all of them for rotor
control, packet tnc, pk900 for rtty, radio control, and cw generation using
the W5XD box.  That testing was done with DXBAse2003.  With Writelog I use
com1 for the W5XD keyer, com2 for packet cluster, com3 for rotor and com4
for radio control (ICOM 756ProII w/CT-17).  I don't know how or if WriteLog
deals with ports above com4, I am sure someone will enlighten me.

Only if you want to use a lap top would you be forced into using USB to com
convertors.  I have never had to do this...but I suppose the day is comming!

Ron N5IN
----- Original Message -----
From: "Blake Meinecke" <n4gi@tampabay.rr.com>
To: "Writelog" <writelog@contesting.com>
Sent: Monday, December 23, 2002 6:10 PM
Subject: Re: Re: [WriteLog] Ports


> > > But there are many motherboards out there that have
> > > the two ports, it just
> > > that they are not being sold to PC makers as they
> > > cost a few dollars more.
>
> Right, all modern mainboards have 2 com ports on them.  I've never bought
a
> PC from a store, but I'm sure that only the top Brand Name pc farming
> companies are eliminating the com ports from their cookie cutter,
> plug-n-pray machines.
>
>
> Blake N4GI
>
>
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