Just adding my couple of pence worth to this. I use a Dell laptop/notebook, running Vista, with a Creative live! 24 bit USB soundcard, which works a treat and can be obtained pretty cheaply on eBay. There are Vista drivers (and w7 too I believe) which work well. The difference in performance between the external card and the onboard 'HD' solution on the laptop (and even an SB Audigy that I had on a tower system) is quite remarkable. No longer do I have bus noise etc masking weak traces. Also the dynamic range seems much better than the on board ones. For PTT and CAT I use 2 leads (one is a USB CAT lead, purchased on eBay for a few pounds. The other is a USB-Serial converter lead (again from eBay and for just £3 inc delivery) which gives me a 'proper' com port for ptt switching (used in conjunction with my G3LIV opto-isolated interface, although you could use any of the simple transistor ptt circuits and wire them into a serial socket) for those programs that don't support ptt via CAT). It's a neat and simple solution, the whole system works very well and requires 3 usb ports to give full CAT and PTT plus soundcard in/out. It is certainly considerably cheaper than some of the other solutions, although maybe not as compact as the single box solutions. All depends what you are looking for, but it is another option to consider. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ 73 de Sean Gilbert G4UCJ - G4001SWL - SWLR-ZN018 Buckingham, Bucks. IO92MA Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.hfradio.org.uk Blog: http://radioactive.hfradio.org.uk TXR: IC756pro RX: Racal RA1792 ANT 1: 40-10m OCF dipole @ 10m agl ANT 2: Wellbrook ALA1530 @ 3m agl 30MDG: #0464; #0463L; EPC: #008L; #015L; NDG# 0163 CDG: #150 DMC: #016SWL; #017SWL; #990; PODXS 070: #139 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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