[Elecraft] K3: Success running LP-Pan on dual booted MacBook Pro

[O. Johns]

Setup:  Early Macbook Pro (actually the model before they changed the  
name to "Pro" but no significant difference here) 13" laptop, running  
Windows XP Pro SP3 as a dual boot under Boot Camp.  E-mu 0202  
soundcard.  USB to Serial converter USBG-232MINI (From http://www.usbgear.com 
. Based on FTDI FT232BM High-Speed USB UART IC as recommended by  
Larry, N8LP.) LP-Bridge 0.0.85 and Power SDR-IF Stage 0.92.  Elecraft  
K3.

Tricks:  (1) Go to the Device Manager and click on View:Show hidden  
drivers.  Find and disable the driver "Apple HAL".  This may require a  
reboot.  (This is mandatory if you want audio.  This driver just about  
maxes out the latency measured by the dpclat.exe utility <http://www.thesycon.de/eng/latency_check.shtml 
 >.)
(2) Right click on the WiFi icon in the taskbar and disable the WiFi.   
(The WiFi is not a very bad actor.  It causes the audio to drop out  
from time to time, but it returns if you restart PowerSDR.)

Results:  After these two drivers are disabled, the audio is clear  
with no dropouts and the panadapter works well at 192kHz.   The CPU  
usage shown by Power SDR-IF Stage is around 22%, maybe peaking to 25%  
when tuning rapidly.  It seems that one could also run CW Skimmer and  
several other programs simultaneously with no problem, although I have  
not tested this.

Caveats:  I dual boot the machine.  I would not advise trying this  
setup with Parallels.  I do not know what the function of the disabled  
driver "Apple HAL" is.  It means "hardware abstraction layer".  I  
haven't done a thorough test to see what functions are lost by  
disabling it.  The machine seems to continue running perfectly well  
under XP, however.  It would probably be best to re-enable that driver  
before doing other things on the machine under XP.  (But the disabled  
Windows driver should have NO effect on the machine when booted into  
OSX, so you could leave it disabled and use the XP boot exclusively  
for your radio work, as I do.)

Note:  The latest drivers for the USBG-232MINI are found at <http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm 
 >.  They are "CDM 2.04.16.exe" for Windows,  
"FTDIUSBSerialDriver_v2_2_10.dmg" for the MacOSX, and  
"ftdi_sio.tar.gz" for Linux.  If you also install the OSX driver, you  
can use the 232MINI to update your K3 in MacOSX using the update  
utility from Elecraft.

Note:  If you do not care about the audio, the two drivers above do  
not need to be disabled.  The panadapter works fine at 192kHz even  
with them enabled.

73,
Oliver Johns
W6ODJ