[Elecraft] Vista 64 USB drivers

[Dave Van Wallaghen]

I noticed some discussion awhile ago about USB drivers for Vista that may or
may not work. I had a catastrophic failure of my old Dell laptop and had to
order a new one. I ordered a ThinkPad T61 with Vista64 business edition (for
many reasons - it's a long story). I was able to find hardware drivers for
all of the hardware I interface to and the transition wasn't as bad as I
thought it was going to be.

I have a 4-port USB hub that feeds a USB Gear 4-port serial converter. This
arrangement worked fine under XP even with my K3 and the K3 firmware
utility. But with Vista64 I could not run Ham Radio Deluxe connected to my
K3. It would hang the laptop after about 20-30 seconds, requiring a hard
reboot. I looked through the forum for HRD and found the same problem being
discussed, but no solution. And it seemed that it was not a total Vista
problem either since a number of people reported that they had no problems
at all.

So I figured it had to be a driver problem and went looking for updated
drivers. The USB Gear serial converter uses an FTDI chip set and so I went
to the FTDI website: www.ftdichip.com and found an updated driver: 2.04.06
dated 3/20/2008. (These are now Microsoft certified). After installation,
all seems to work just fine. The Elecraft K3 Utility seems to work fine also
(I haven't tried updating the firmware yet since I'm current). 

I also found an updated Prolific driver for the KUSB for Vista64. It
installed correctly and reports a new serial com port under Device Manager,
but I could not communicate with the K3 through HRD or the K3 utility. They
both find the port number ok, but state nothing is there. So I'm not so sure
that the driver is a go yet for Vista64 and the KUSB.

Just FYI for anyone else fighting this battle.

73,
Dave W8FGU