Of course, if you don't have a spare RS232 port then CAT contol is obviously better. At least for PSK, I found the CAT control on the MP to work just fine.
I question the "timing" conclusion. Anybody who has tried using RS232 ports or LPT's for sending CW knows the highly buffered environment in XP and VISTA screws up the timing. We're talking way more than 10 ms delays and timing inaccuracies. People have gotten around this in XP by a program called DLPORT which allows direct port writes like one could do in older OS's. Another solution has been to use WINKEY instead of generating CW within the computer. One sends out an ASCII character via a port and the WINKEY PIC generates the perfect CW character. In effect it is a CW TNC. That's real progress! Instead of just turning on and off an external line at prescribed times one has to resort to such nonsense. Anyhow the software/hardware out there should be working on USB interfaces rather than COM port interfaces. USB/com port intefaces have been problematic with RTTY due to the slow baud rate. I assume the same would be true for these modes. Obviously rig control for most present generation rigs has to be over COM's. Most USB/COM port converters work OK for rig control. However, the same timing problems most likely exist. I simply don't know if USB timing suffers from the above timing problems or not. Perhaps so. But for computers with no COM ports, USB is the way to go. The problem is that a real time operating system is needed when timing is critical. 73 de Brian/K3KO --- In [email protected], "Simon Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Chiming in here: no delays, less to go wrong. Also a *lot* easier for the > poor old programmer. > > Simon Brown, HB9DRV > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Jon Maguire" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > Can you give a rundown as why dedicated PTT is better than CAT PTT? > > Thank you. >
