[Elecraft] OT Ethernet/RS-232

[Joshua Mesilane]

This is not exactly true.

RS232 is still widely used over long haul RF links, telemetry and scads systems. Why? It's reliable, it just works, you don't have to stuff around with drivers or custom software and its a self recovering system.

USB is a vendor driven platform. There are very few "universal" USB serial links (despite what you might think, most "USB" rigs today just use an rs232 or FTDI chip) it requires custom drivers from each chip manufacturer ( and often each vendor of said chip ) for eac Operating system, architecture (x86, x86_64, arm, sun/oracle, etc) whereas with RS232 this is all already done.

In the domestic world RS232 might be fading away, but its still very much prevalent in commercial, industrial and telemetry environments.

----
VK3XJM
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http://www.zindello.com.au/
josh at zindello.com.au

On 28/11/2012, at 9:59, Bill Frantz <frantz at pwpconsult.com> wrote:

> I would say there are many many more computer to computer connections over TCP than over RS-232. And many more over PPPoE <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to-point_protocol_over_Ethernet>.
> 
> As far as I can tell, hams are the only users of RS-232 left. (RS-232 has the wonderful advantage of making it easy to build interfaces.) I don't think there are any new laptop computers with RS223 ports. Are there any desktops/towers?
> 
> I am a big fan of the IP protocol family for general communications between devices. With a broad collection of protocols which include flow-controlled point-to-point (TCP), Multicast <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_multicast>, Datagram (UDP); most communication problems can be solved with a well-tested protocol.
> 
> Full disclosure: One of the happiest days of my life was about 8 years ago when I got rid of the last RS-232 connection in my house. Newer systems used USB and ethernet and older ones got turned off. Then I got active in ham radio...
> 
> Cheers - Bill, AE6JV
> 
> On 11/27/12 at 2:03 PM, w3fpr at embarqmail.com (Don Wilhelm) wrote:
> 
>> I would submit that RS-232 is still the common denominator for point to point computer communications.  No licenses, no registration, no unique IP addresses, just "communicate".
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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