I have found that the USB world has not really taken over ham radio yet, sure there are some USB devices out there but not many. If you are like me you have more serial cables that you do ports on your computer. Most if not all new laptops only have USB ports. As for PC's they may come with a total of one. There are the USB to serial converters but I find them to be a bit fussy at times to set up and get good communication going. Last year I came across a product called
Edgeport from Digi international these units can take up to 16 serial cables and with only one USB cable going to the PC. I have the 4 port model and found it on Ebay for about 60.00. Over the past year I have found this unit to work great. You can have all serial cables communicating at the same time. I have never noticed and troubles or slow downs. This is a great solution for the shack with multi serial cables and not enough ports on the PC. If you need it for portable use such as field day it's great as it gets it's power from the USB port so no external power source is needed.
4 comments:
Hi Mike, that could be the solution for a lot connection troubles. Still I can't work with CAT control. Drivers problems, OS instability and so on. Still I work the old fashion way. Bass PE4BAS put a video on his blog how easy a CAT control set up is done. I hope one day that I will succeed. 73 Paul
Hi Mike, your model has in fact 4 USB to serial converters on board and a USB hub to connect all those to one USB port. It is a nice solution though. Does it have FTDI chips by coincidence? 73, Bas
Good morning Paul, sorry to hear that CAT control just can't get along with your OS. I still use XP and along with the Edgeport I have no troubles at all with any devices. This is one reason I am sticking with XP for as long as I can. Not looking forward to switching to Win7 not sure if the driver market has caught up with it yet.
Good morning Bas, I tried to Google the FTDI chip set and Edgeport but nothing came up as a match. I am not sure if it uses this chip or not...I do know it sure does make combining my radio stuff and PC a whole lot easier.
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