Yeah, no more serial ports…. Man I still need serial ports.
In the past month I have built a new PC. The new motherboard doesn’t have serial ports. No problem, I haven’t used serial ports in years, or so I thought. I have been looking at adding rig control for my Icom 706MKIIG ham radio. The great thing about rig control is that I can then use my PC to control the radio or have logging software pickup the frequency and mode that the radio is on when an entry into the log is made. Icom makes a unit for rig control but it is a serial device. There are several rig control circuits on the Internet, but all the ones I have found use serial RS-232 interfaces.
Lucky for me I came across the Rigtalk. It is made by West Mountain Radio and will control the equipment using one USB port on my PC. They only provide Windows drivers, so i can’t control the radio under Linux. Still I like this option better than playing with USB to RS-232 dongles.
I would really like Icom and other radio equipment manufacturers to update their product lines. Sure a serial interface might be cheap but more and more computers are shedding their legacy interfaces. Parallel Ports, serial ports, PS/2, and other old interfaces are just about gone on all current PC motherboards, and Macs. Just goes to show, when you think you no longer need that 20-30 year old interface, something comes up and you need it after all.