Well,
I've done a little more experimenting and think I know what is going on, at
least with my own software. It may also explain what's going on with the
N4PY software.
One of the nice things about the protocol for the RX-340 is that it is
completely text based and the radio can be controlled and monitored using a
dumb terminal program, such as HyperTerm. At 9600 baud, I discovered that
HyperTerm works just fine with the RX340. Granted, I wasn't polling it at
100 msec intervals, but it would respond to every poll I gave it. I then
discovered that both the N4PY software and my software could send commands
to the radio, they were just not indicating responses from the radio. IOW, I
could set the frequency, filtering and mode using computer, but the S-Meter
was not responding.
After debugging my software, I'm pretty sure what is happening. In Windows
serial port programming, there are a couple of ways to get data from the
external device. One is to read each character as it comes in. This is what
HyperTerm does. In my software, however, since each response was terminated
by a carriage return, I was having Windows wait and only notify my program
when a complete message ( i.e. a carriage return ) was received. This method
works fine with a 'real' serial port. With the USB port, this notification
was not received, so no incoming data was processed. My USB -> serial
converter has TX and RX LEDs and I could clearly see the TX polling and RX
response. So I have concluded that the problem is that the driver software
that came with my converter isn't properly supporting the wait for a
particular character function. With my own software, it won't be to
difficult to modify the software to work around it.
I got a couple of replies that said they had a USB -> serial converter that
worked. My guess is that the drivers are better. It would be interesting to
see if drivers for one converter would work with another. I did find one
website that had a link to drivers, which I think were from the chip
manufacturer. They worked the same as the drivers that I got with my
converter.
73,
Mark.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Erbaugh" <mark@microenh.com>
To: "Tentec (E-mail)" <tentec@contesting.com>
Sent: Friday, July 12, 2002 8:22 AM
Subject: [TenTec] USB -> RS232
> Has anyone had any luck using a USB -> RS232 converter to control a
Pegasus? I've tried both the TT software and N4PY and they refuse to
establish communications with the Pegasus. If I reconfigure them to use a
'real' COM port, all works FB.
>
> I've tried connecting the USB -> RS232 converter both to the USB port on
the computer directly and through an externally powered 4 port hub.
>
> The particular converter is a GoldX GXUSB-1200 and I've tried two
different units with the same results.
>
> I also tried hooking up my Rascal computer -> PTT interface to see if the
GoldX converters could control that and that does seem to work. They can
control PTT using either RTS or DTR lines.
>
>
> Mark
>
>
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