[WriteLog] ON moving from WIN 98 to XP and serial ports and sound boards

[NI7T]

Again thanks to those on this reflector with the time to advise me on interfacing WL with my station.

 This info is offered to help the next guy.


The following steps were needed to finally interface my station and new XP computers with WL on SSB, CW, and RTTY.

I replaced the on board sound card  on the new  XP computer after it failed the WL sound board test, I used 1 PCI expansion slot to add a new sound card...first with a Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-FI which also failed ..then I replaced the X-FI card with a generic card distributed by StarTech.com called  a PCISOUND4CH ..This is a cheap $14 board had  barely enough instructions to install it...but it works....

A second major problem was masking the sound board issue when I tried to setup my station to use WLRTTY (FSK) in the NAQP test. ....current computers have either USB  or in the one I found several USB ports and 1 serial port and 1 LPT port and 4 expansion slots  and of course with an XP operating system I could not access the LPT....so I added  a SIIG Inc 4 port serial card using the second  PCI slot however with my PROII using COM 1 the RTTY control went to COM3 on the SIIG card (COM 2 is not available) as soon as I select RTTY in WL the computer crashed...

After a lot of fruitless attempts to figure out what was wrong I decided to work from the know good....I knew COM 1 worked with the PROII and I knew that COM2 worked on CW..the RTTY was the new addition so I switched COM 1 and COM 3 rebooted and everything works on SSB CW and RTTY..My conclusion is the virtual COM ports 3 - 6 on the SIIG card  are not the same as the mother board based COM1 as far as the RTTY control is concerned ...No science here just luck...and I did run a few Q's in the NAQP.
 
Mike Reagan    NI7T  or  NI6P
Quincy California

" Don't be upset...these things happen to people"

Jim Harrison  2009