[Elecraft] KUSB for K3

[Brian Lloyd]

On May 7, 2007, at 7:20 AM, Thom LaCosta wrote:

> On Sun, 6 May 2007, Brian Lloyd wrote:
>
>>
>> But getting back to the question, insofar as the K3 is concerned,  
>> it is doing serial async RS-232. That is pretty generic. Virtually  
>> any one-USB-to-one-serial-port adaptor is going to work with your  
>> computer.
>
> I have been through 3 adpaters here that don't work with my  
> Dell....I hope the KUSB does.

I suspect you will find that the KUSB won't work either.

I suspect you are running Windows. There you are at the mercy of each  
provider of the USB/serial converter to provide you with a driver  
that works. But as someone else said, it could be a problem with the  
USB port on the computer. Via made a USB 1.0 chip at one point that  
ended up in a lot of computers and that just didn't work right.  
Getting USB to work properly on those computers is a challenge and  
many USB devices just didn't work right as a result.

So, getting USB to work depends on the following:

1. the chip(s) implementing the USB port in your computer;
2. the driver for the chip implementing the USB port in your computer;
3. the chip(s) implementing the serial-to-USB adaptor;
4. the driver provided with the serial-to-USB adaptor.

If you are using a MacOS, Linux, or a flavor of UNIX you will find  
that there tend to be only a few generic drivers for this since the  
drivers are based on the chip(s) used. Windows requires a vendor- 
specific driver for each device. The latter means that even if you  
get the same hardware (serial-to-USB converter) from two different  
vendors (generic Taiwanese serial-to-USB adaptor), you need two  
different drivers for Windows but only one generic driver with MacOS,  
Linux, or *NIX.

73 de Brian, WB6RQN
Brian Lloyd - brian HYPHEN wb6rqn AT lloyd DOT com