Thanks guys. You have given me some food for thought. "Have you set-up your printer / print drivers, to print from DOS, instead of Windows?"
I tried to find this but did not find out how to do it. "Although many Motorola RSS programs cannot read from or write to a radio while in a Windows Command Prompt, most will print just fine. Save the codeplug to your root drive, where you can find it easily. Close the DOS program and re-open the RSS in a Windows Command Prompt. Read the archive file and then print it. This works just fine for me." "One solution is to run your RSS under DOS to do the download and upload to the radio, and run it in a Windows DOS box to do the printing." I will go try this. It sounds like a simple solution. Also, many thanks for the other help. I did not want to go find an old printer, since I have had many in the past and they are all in the garbage long ago! Roger W5RD ----- Original Message ----- From: Mike Morris WA6ILQ To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2006 6:54 PM Subject: Re: [Repeater-Builder] Printing from RSS At 03:40 PM 12/30/06, you wrote: >I am trying to print a copy of a codeplug for my MSF5000 repeater, but >have not been successful. I keep getting an error on the RSS screen >when I hit the F key to print that says the printer is not ready. I >have it hooked up successfully to the laptop (Sony Vaio 1 GHz) and it >is printing OK on other files (Windows stuff of course). I can't get >past the error code. I must be doing something wrong. Any suggestions? > >Roger W5RD RSS expects a self-contained printer that takes in the single byte of data that represents the letter and prints it. For example, a hex 41 is a letter "A". Most modern printers require drivers that live in Windows. These printers, for example, don't print a letter, they print the graphic shape of the letter - and that requires a multi-byte stream that describes that shape in whatever graphics language that the printer understands (HPGL, Postcript, whatever... As they need windows to operate, one derogatory term that is used is that they are "winprinters". One solution is to run your RSS under DOS to do the download and upload to the radio, and run it in a Windows DOS box to do the printing. Another is to find yourself a "dumber" printer - an Epson, Star Micronics, Centronics, IBM Proprinter, or similar printer. Most of these will be dot matrix technology.... however not all. For example my Laserjet 4 powers up in "dumb" mode, and works just fine with RSS as long as I force a page feed as needed. Some of the newer printers will work, but the data sheet on the printer has to say DOS compatible. Mike WA6ILQ
