[aprssig] Re: Agw tracker and Agw packet engine

[Mark Fellhauer]

At 11:31 AM 1/14/2007, Stephen H. Smith wrote:


>1)   You will have to purchase the Packet Engine Pro.  The freeware 
>version won't work with the Baycom modem on Win 2K or XP .
>2)  Even the Pro version (which you can try free for 30 days to "test 
>drive")may not work,   since any laptop modern enough to run XP probably 
>either a) doesn't have serial ports at all or b) has ACPI [power managed] 
>serial ports which won't work with AGW.
>The Baycom isn't really a modem at all.  It's a high-gain audio amp that 
>feeds clipped and saturated receiver AUDIO (not demodulated serial data) 
>into one of the hand shaking lines of the serial port (not the data-in 
>line).  Software on the PC counts how many times/second the pin is flipped 
>up and down to determine what audio tone freq is being heard.
>In other words, the "modem" is in software inside the PC. This requires 
>that the program running on the PC have direct access to the serial port 
>HARDWARE, bypassing Windows' overhead.  This can be done in DOS, Win 
>3.x  and Win 95/98 but is nearly impossible to do in Win 2K or XP.
>
>
>You will be better off trying to use AGW's soundcard mode instead.

Interesting.  It's funny how so many people say serial ports don't work 
under XP in DOS, but I've run Trunker (in a DOS Box) on several XP 
machines, using a very simple two-level data slicer.  It also works with 
other DOS-based decoder software for ACARS, POCSAG, etc.

I will admit, most soundcard based decoders work well and are generally 
easier to set up.

73,

Mark