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I recently replaced my shack computer, a Dell Optiplex, with a Dell Precision i7 workstation. I generally buy off-lease computers, since they are only a couple years old, well-equipped and reasonably priced, and Linux runs on them just fine.<\/p>\nI recently replaced my shack computer, a Dell Optiplex, with a Dell Precision i7 workstation. I generally buy off-lease computers, since they are only a couple years old, well-equipped and reasonably priced, and Linux runs on them just fine.<\/p>\n
For contest logging, I’m slowly working in the N1MM direction (there’s a trick or two to running it well under wine<\/em>), so I still use a DOS-based logging program that relies on serial and parallel ports for keying and rig control. The beauty of running DOS under Linux (via dosemu<\/em>) is that you can assign any hardware resource to what DOS sees as COM1, LPT1, etc. dosemu<\/em> interfaces to the device socket, and Linux does the heavy lifting of translating that into the physical port.<\/p>\n The Optiplex had a serial port and a parallel port, so I was using the serial port to do rig control (the TS-590SG helpfully has an honest-to-goodness RS232 port) and the parallel port for CW keying via a homebrew interface similar to the diagram above. However, with the decline of printers with Centronics parallel interfaces (nearly all are now either USB or Ethernet), computers are losing the 25-pin parallel port – and the 9-pin RS232 interface is becoming more and more scarce as well. The Precision workstation doesn’t have a parallel port, so I had to make some changes so I could still do both rig control and keying.<\/p>\n Fortunately, the 590 also has a USB port, over which you can do both rig control and audio interface. You connect the USB port to the computer and the rig appears as a second sound card, to which you can point fldigi, wsjt<\/em> or other sound-card mode digital software.<\/p>\n I first tried doing both rig control and keying over the serial port using a breakout cable that I built, but ran into some configuration problems with the logger. I don’t know why it didn’t work, but it might have been that the CTS\/RTS or DSR\/DCD lines weren’t tied, which the rig might have relied on for handshaking. So I skipped that step and decided to configure the rig control over USB instead. Since dosemu<\/em> lets you point its COM ports at any system device, I set up dosemu<\/em> so that COM1 was the usb serial device (\/dev\/ttyUSB0) and COM2 was the hardware serial port (\/dev\/ttyS1), which was configured in BIOS to be COM2. After setting up the logger to use COM1 for rig control and COM2 for keying, everything worked great!<\/p>\n Getting dosemu<\/em> to run properly with DOS-based logging has been a struggle at times, but I did finally settle on a good way to do it. That will be the subject of another article.<\/p>\n So, look for me in the next CWops sprint or other CW contest, and I’ll be keying away with my serial port interface.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently replaced my shack computer, a Dell Optiplex, with a Dell Precision i7 workstation. I generally buy off-lease computers, since they are only a couple years old, well-equipped and reasonably priced, and Linux runs on them just fine. For contest logging, I’m slowly working in the N1MM direction (there’s a trick or two to … <\/p>\n