[WriteLog] Serial Port Choppy CW

[Ford Peterson]

George wrote:

> Jim,
> 
> Choppy cw has always been a problem with WL as far as I know.  It  happens 
> with cw keying on both serial port and lpt ports.  I  believe it is associated 
> with the cpu being "overloaded" by too many  processes requiring cpu cycles 
> simultaneously.  You can reduce the  occurrence of choppy cw by shutting down any 
> programs that are running  concurrently with WL, such as virus checking 
> software, but you will  probably not eliminate the problem altogether.
> 
...snip...
> 
> 73, Geo...k5kg

I have been using LPT1 keying on WL for years.  I never get choppy CW.  The secret?  Turn off your screen savers, leave windows with the default (plain jane) desktop format.  Turn off all battery savers, disk spin-down contraptions, everything.  Any gismo running on your desktop that has a timer is going to cause problems.  If you are busy with the contest, you shouldn't be expecting your screen to go into 'save' mode anyway.  The interrupts related to those contraptions will distract the processor 'mid-stream' in a CW sending situation.  Some interrupt timer goes off and the processor has to check to see if the disk should get spun down, or whether it is leap year, or midnight of daylight savings, or whatever.  Turn off all that worthless crap and you will be fine.

We tried XP machines using serial port/USB converters this past weekend and got lots of complaints from the ops about "runaway keying".  George suggests the MicroHam gismos.  We had Ralph-K0IR here this past weekend.  They used those $99 MicroHam USB port boxes at PeterI and just loved them.  It may be the only way to go if you intend to keep WL as the log of choice.  

We have decided to abandon WL for good.  As far as we can see, there is nobody doing any serious development that will support M/M ops.  Stand alone may be fine, but M/M and network support is all but completely busted.  Sad day frankly...  We lost hundreds of Qs due to WL network snaffus last weekend.  I managed to find 170Qs on one laptop in a file that had been misnamed after a reboot due to "WL needs to shut down" message.  It was a complete fluke that we found those.  Hundreds more were placed in correctly named files and are now gone for good.  Never again!

Ford-N0FP
ford at cmgate.com