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 {at} 1:117/3001

--- Maximus/2 3.01