On Mon, 2008-08-25 at 07:24 -0500, R. Kevin Stover wrote: > - -- > Me neither but they did do something Elecraft had the chance to do and > didn't. USB ports for rig control.
I strongly disagree. I have a collection of devices that have USB ports but are now effectively unusable because manufacturers no longer keep the drivers current with the latest operating systems. Some of these devices represent considerable investment at the time. With the K3 I can use just about any USB to serial converter to 'solve' the problem and if in a few years support for that particular USB/serial converter is dropped then for a few bucks I can get another one. The K3 works just fine with the 3 Euro one I found on ebay. I can choose to use a usb - serial converter already supported by Linux rather than waiting (perhaps for ever..) for the manufacturer to release USB specs so that open source drivers can be written. Serial ports are still quite common on desktop class machines and remain ubiquitous on both server class and embedded class hardware. Serial ports remain the primary 'console' interface for network infrastructure such as managed routers. For rig control to remain compatible with existing software (something that elecraft have done very well by the way) then any USB interface is going to have to emulate a normal serial port. On the K3 Internal USB would gain us nothing and create additional support issues for elecraft to deal with. External usb to serial adapters are both easily available and cheap 73 Brendan EI6IZ -- Don‘t complain. Nobody will understand. Or care. And certainly don‘t try to fix the situation yourself. It‘s dangerous. Leave it to a highly untrained, unqualified, expendable professional. _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: [email protected] You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
