[Elecraft] Give us a network interface

[Jack Brabham]

  From  my perspective, I see serial interfaces as increasingly 
problematic due to unavailability.

PC motherboard manufacturers are dropping serial ports due to a 
widespread lack of use and interest.   And as many have noted, USB to 
serial converters can be a PITA.

My current Mobo, which is about 3 years old and due for replacement this 
winter, has one serial port that exists on some header that is not 
brought out to the rear panel.   Finding a PCI RS-232 serial board for 
it that had Win 7-64 drivers was a challenge.    I only found one.  When 
Win 8 comes around next year the number of supported serial boards could 
easily become zero.  PCI slots are also on the way out, many current 
high end boards now only include one "token" PCI slot with the rest of 
the slots being some flavor of PCI-E

None of the current issue motherboards I'm considering for my next 
station PC include a serial port or more than one PCI slot.

So, I'm sorry for those who find serial ports warm and comforting, but 
they a about to join paper tape punches/readers, 8 inch floppys, and 
CRTs on the list of quaint old technologies that are no longer 
manufactured or supportable.

In the meanwhile, rigs and other station equipment are ever increasingly 
interconnected and interdependent (read "networked").

Clinging to serial ports is not really a viable option going forward, 
neither in terms of providing the desired functionality nor of being 
supported by general market hardware/software suppliers.   TCP/IP over 
Ethernet wouldn't exactly be a giant leap into the future but it is 
already supported by any number of ham applications for networking and 
for internal communications between modules.

In the meanwhile I'm really glad to have LP_Bridge and the MicroHam 
Router so the station works almost like it had a real network.


73 Jack KZ5A
K3 #4165