Text 67, 103 rader
Skriven 2005-01-09 23:22:10 av Mike Luther (1:117/3001.0)
     Kommentar till text 63 av Bob Klahn (1:123/140)
Ärende: Hardware MB question
============================
Hi Bob.

 BK>  USB based serial adapters?

Nope.  The service uses line level operations direct down to the hardware level
in the actual serial ports.  Per what I've been told by others, USB is dead for
this kind of work.  But I could be wrong at that and am just now getting into
that discussion and research gambit with someone in the OS/2 world that really
does have the training to know. He's been part of the coaching as to what
awaits.  In his case they have a major chunk of oil field and water well field
controller application code which is heavily hardware dependent.  He's
concerned too and is far more aware than I am.

 ML> from antenna positioning to TNC and HF radio station
 ML> control.. Gloom ..

 BK>  HF?

HF is High Frequency.  As contrasted to VHF which is Very High Frequency.  I'm
a Narte certified Telecommunications Engineer with heavy Broadcast station and
HF radio circuit experience.  At this point,though at 65, I'm far more
interested in my ham station with large low band antennas and almost exclusive
interest in low band CW (Telegraph) operations.   For thought purposes, we call
MF (Medium Frequency) radio stations as those which use the 550Khz to about
1600Khz range; the AM broadcast band.  HF extends from there, 1.6Mhz (1600Khz),
the top of the broadcast band up to say 30Mhz.  That's what many folks think
about as shortwave radio.  From 30Mhz up to over 400Mhz is VHF.

The 'low band' interest for me is the 40 and 80 meter (7Mhz and 3.5Mhz) bands
which have relatively larger antenna lengths.  In my case, my 80 meter antenna
array is four roughly 70 foot towers fed by phase shifted switched coax
feedlines by my home-made kilowatt station.  And in this case all the control
switching, the complete telegraph control operations, integrated logging and
interface to the Internet, plus other phone line remote control operations are
all computer controlled.  I wrote the original code on my first computer ..

     A Heathkit H-89 serial# 679 .. back in 1974 .. under CP/M.

I still have it.  The required assembly language code moved forward into what
was HeathDos in a then new Zentih ZVM-120.  And from there into M/S operating
system code on it and got larger and more complex.

     I still have the Zenith 120 computers here too.

From there it went to more conventional, but still antique now MS-DOS generic
box work .. and thence into DesqView to splice the phone lines,remote operating
access .. and integrated station work on them.

     I still have that box too.

Then ... OH WONDER JOY .. along came IBM's OS/2 in version 2.0.  Beat the heck
out of DesqView and along came more antique bigger and better stuff.  The
station and all my professional work is STILL running in industrial grade
passive backplane relay rack systems .. now fully LAN integrated under OS/2 and
op-position homed by Rose KVM switch racks of stuff.  Virtually all of which is
still served perfectly well by OS/2 now In the MCP2 current system level .. 32
bit TCP/IP .. full LAN merged phone lines, IP interfaces; a complete phone line
to HF digital gateway operation, as well as cross gatewayed operations to VHF
packet as well.

The entire operation is such that you have complete hardware control, keying ..
and full break-in telegraph operations, at the same time you can look at 20
years of total database and log entries.  The instant you enter a call for
anyone in the now 1,600,000 or so known calls world-wide, it matches previous
contacts, key information, and also shows the actual distance and direction to
them in real-time on the operating screen, together with antenna operations
pointers.  As well the system can do a complete radio propagation forecast and
path optimization popup display, plus calculate the precise positions of the
sunrise and sunset times and terminator line positions that are so important
for these lowband operations world-wide.

That's also feedable and integrated with world-wide cluster spotting for others
all over the world in real-time as well.  All of these tools use serial port
technology for interfaces.  Hence the concern for serial port compatibility
into the future!

All from no more than a 500 Mhz ANTIQUE computer CPU which is MORE than enough
horsepower -- as long as it's OS/2, grin!  Well, you could do it in LINUX or
UNIX .. but darned sure not in Windows at anywhere close to an antique system,
chuckle.  Maybe..

And .. portions of the operating code in the assembly language libraries for
the comm routines which were written in 1974 ... are still working just fine
today..  Under OS/2.

 ML> Duhh ...  a 2.2GHz Intel CPU is now a classic!

 BK>  And I'm sticking with my 1.6Ghz Dell.

But what will we do when something breaks and we have no more goodies? I've
invested a really substantial amount of time writing all this custome software
for all this. Time marches forward, sigh.

BTW .. my ham call is W5WQN, first issued in 1952.  I, too, am an antique!



--> Sleep well; OS/2's still awake! ;)

Mike @ 1:117/3001

--- Maximus/2 3.01
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