[Elecraft] suggested PC??? Real RS-232 ports

[Jim Brown]

I agree with Joe. A 2-port Edgeport provides two good RS-232 ports for 
SO2R operation with my very new T540 Thinkpad.  It, and another Thinkpad 
bought around the same time, are the first I've ever owned that didn't 
have a hardware serial port either on the chassis or on a port 
replicator/docking station.  My older laptops have PCMCIA slots, which 
accept excellent cards that provide 2 hardware  RS-232 ports. They've 
been on a LOT of Field Days and California QSO Party county expeditions.

In today's world, 8 GB and an i7 processor is pretty much minimum; it 
runs four RTTY decoders (two on each of two radios for SO2R) 
simultaneously without any problem. I've added solid state drives to two 
laptops, and it's really speeded them up nicely.  One, a T61 Thinkpad, 
is 8 years old!

A local ham who makes his living doing IT for small biz, do  NOT 
recommend Win10, because it has a nasty habit of uninstalling software 
that it doesn't like. I'm sticking win Win7 until it dies.

73, Jim K9YC

On Tue,1/5/2016 2:54 PM, Joe Subich, W4TV wrote:
>
> On 1/5/2016 5:32 PM, Doug Person via Elecraft wrote:
>> A 4-port card is NOT a native RS-232 port. PCI is just another bus
>> add on.
>
> *Absolutely incorrect*.  A USB to serial converter *of any kind* -
> other than the Edgeport products - can not do 45.45, 50, 75 or 100
> baud RTTY.  All of the multi-port RS-232 PCI and PCIe cards handle
> that task with no problem (although Windows will set 45.45 baud to
> 45 baud because the API is integer based).
>
> PCI and PCIe based serial and parallel port cards are true memory
> addressed ports like motherboard or (obsolete) ISA bus ports - not
> USB devices that suffer from latency and driver buffer issues.