[WriteLog] LPT CW Keying

[Mike McCarthy, W1NR]

Many Dell laptops use the parallel port for floppy and CD rom drives
with special cables and, I assume, a special LPT port driver.  If you
replace the LPT port driver on one of these, bad things happen...

What is wrong with serial port keying?  On my Dell, I use the internal
serial port for keying and USB to serial converters for rig control.  I
find that the opto isolated serial port circuits greatly improve
reliability (runaway keying due to RFI is all but eliminated).

Mike, W1NR


-----Original Message-----
From: writelog-bounces at contesting.com
[mailto:writelog-bounces at contesting.com]On Behalf Of k0bx at qsl.net
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 1:28 PM
To: Writelog
Subject: [WriteLog] LPT CW Keying


Our company radio club, Boeing Employees Radio Society
(BEARS) STL, received 7 newer PC's (750 MHZ) to
replace our 266 mhz pcs in our club station.  They are
pulls from  the latest company upgrade.  I wanted to
use the WIN2000 OS that is on them but our keying
cables for cw on the WIN98SE machines are for the
printer port (LPT).

So last night in installed Writelog on the first
machine, no problem all went well and all is working.

I then installed UserPort.exe to direct the CW keying
to the printer port.  It didn't work, so I re-booted
the PC.  Funny thing happened; The CD ROM was removed
from the BIOS giving a error.  Once in WIN2000
everything worked except for the CD ROM.  Detect new
hardward could not find it and it was not in the
Windows system.  Now I did not get a chance to test
the CD Rom before doing the install.  I assumed it was
working when we received the machine.  Has anyone
heard or had such a problem?  I will try to reinstall
the CD ROM drives tonight.

BTW the UserPort.exe worked without a problem.
Writelog said LPT-1 was there and CW Keying on the
LPT-1 is smooth and clean.

I have 3 more machine to do before FD.  I would hate
to blow the CD ROM in all of them.

And yes, W0MA the clubstation callsign, is a register
user of WL.

Joe K0BX





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