[Elecraft] Re: USB vs. RS232

[Wayne Burdick]

Thanks, everyone, for your observations on this topic.

RS232 is still widely used both in industrial and hobbyist applications,
which is why both through-hole and surface-mount RS232 driver ICs are
plentiful, widely second-sourced, and inexpensive. It allows for a
low-cost hardware implementation that keeps digital noise to an absolute
minimum without any shielding, and the firmware overhead is quite low.
It takes literally just a few lines of code to implement the driver
routines--the PIC's on-chip USART does the rest.

USB is certainly a viable alternative that we'll consider supporting in
future products. Meanwhile, RS232->USB converters will be the rule for
those using newer PCs, not just to talk to their K2s, but to a lot of
other ham gear as well.

73,
Wayne
N6KR