From my perspective, I see serial interfaces as increasingly problematic due to unavailability.
PC motherboard manufacturers are dropping serial ports due to a widespread lack of use and interest. And as many have noted, USB to serial converters can be a PITA. My current Mobo, which is about 3 years old and due for replacement this winter, has one serial port that exists on some header that is not brought out to the rear panel. Finding a PCI RS-232 serial board for it that had Win 7-64 drivers was a challenge. I only found one. When Win 8 comes around next year the number of supported serial boards could easily become zero. PCI slots are also on the way out, many current high end boards now only include one "token" PCI slot with the rest of the slots being some flavor of PCI-E None of the current issue motherboards I'm considering for my next station PC include a serial port or more than one PCI slot. So, I'm sorry for those who find serial ports warm and comforting, but they a about to join paper tape punches/readers, 8 inch floppys, and CRTs on the list of quaint old technologies that are no longer manufactured or supportable. In the meanwhile, rigs and other station equipment are ever increasingly interconnected and interdependent (read "networked"). Clinging to serial ports is not really a viable option going forward, neither in terms of providing the desired functionality nor of being supported by general market hardware/software suppliers. TCP/IP over Ethernet wouldn't exactly be a giant leap into the future but it is already supported by any number of ham applications for networking and for internal communications between modules. In the meanwhile I'm really glad to have LP_Bridge and the MicroHam Router so the station works almost like it had a real network. 73 Jack KZ5A K3 #4165 ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
