[Elecraft] K3 competition from Icom?

[Brendan Minish]

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.