PCMCIA Serial Card

[kc2kzz]

I came across this today, seems like a good deal.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5572

[4n6inv]

First question: Are you planning on using this with CPS or RSS? You may play hell trying to get DOS to recognize a PCMCIA card. Second question: If you are using Windoes based CPS; are you certain that this card will work with Motorola Software? I had to get a new laptop, because mine was stolen. I couldn't find a comparable replacement that had a serial port, so I got the one with no serial port, and ordered the PCMCIA card like this one to run CPS on. No joy! and I mean NO JOY! I spent days on the phone with their tech support, and the end result was that they just didn't know why it wouldn't work, but it didn't. I called Motorola Software Tech Support, and they told me that none of the PCMCIA cards that they knew of were compatible with Motorola Software. Just damn. They did tell me, off the record, that the USB serial adapters do work, but only a few. He named them off to me, but I can't rmember which ones work. Mine is a IO-Systems, IO-Magic or something like that. Sure enough; it works like a champ. Now; the bad news about that is; if you're using RSS, it's nearly impossible to make DOS recognize the USB device. Good luck! Post back and let everyone know what does and doesn't work.

Jim

[MattSR]

The USB-RS232 adaptors based on the Prolific chipset work well for me. I've even had them working on CPS, running under Win XP, running inside VMware Fusion, running under OS X on my Macintosh. Read and Wrote to the radio fine.

[akardam]

I have also had luck with the Prolific based USB->Serial adapters with Windows CPS... for programming. However, I've never been able to get them to work when performing a Flashport refresh or upgrade using a SRIB.

I recently purchased a 2 port Quatech RS232 PCMCIA card, and can happily report that every programming or flash operation I've tried with it has succeeded without incident. The Quatech part number is DSP-100.

For the record, PCMCIA drivers in DOS are not nearly as problematic as USB drivers in DOS.