Notes on PC 10

Bought for CCC by K8ND from RetroBox, Columbus. Shipped by K8ND to K1XX for transportation to Curacao, October 2005

Installed Windows 98 SE. Installed Writelog 10.55D and all needed ham software. There were no drivers for SVGA, NIC, or sound card. N0YY downloaded Optiplex GX-110 drivers and installed them successfully.

PC10 would not identify itself by its NETBIOS name (PC10) on the Ethernet. I installed File and Printer Sharing and that cured the problem.

Moved to closet for backup because the voice keying would not work with this sound card.

Would not boot. Reseated cards and CPU but still no boot. Booted to safe mode and set display res to 640 x 480. Booted OK, then set resolution back up with success after it installed a driver for the Envision monitor. Downloaded Microsoft Windows installed successfully and then installed WL 10.69. System works perfectly now.

Placed in service by K6AM at Station 4. Had difficulty installing WinKeyer drivers and support files. All else installed up to date.

Cannibalized good power supply from this machine in order to fix PC9. New supply on order for PC10.

N4QQ installed power supply taken from PC9. System works. Installed WL 10.82. System is in backup status. All works OK.

W0CG installed Winkey drivers. All works OK. Used at Station 3 for last portion of ARRL DX CW.

K6AM was setting up for ARRL DX SSB and this machine was not booting reliably. Got scary text messages at bootup time, then it froze.

Careful tests show this machine to be reliable EXCEPT that WinKeyer keying is unusable (see below) even after reinstalling the driver. LPT1 keying works fine. Sound board is dead. Placed back in spares.

Tried to boot but BIOS saw no hard drive. I swapped in the hard drove from PC9 and all is now OK.

Jeff,

After many, many hours of patient troubleshooting, K6AM figured out the WinKeyer problems at PJ2T.

With Writelog 10.80 and above (10.82, 83, and 84), WinKey keying on Windows 98 is broken. It's fine on the XP machines, but not on Windows 98. We tested our old favorite, WL 10.69D, and all works perfectly on all our machines. The symptoms include sometimes no CW, sometimes mutilated CW, sometimes only the first three or four characters of a message will be sent, sometimes the messages start in the middle of the string ("J2T CQ Test P"), and the speed locking up at about 17 WPM despite pot setting or software setting. Also noticed that a mutilated message will send once when, say, F2 is pressed, but then will not send from F2 again unless you send at least one dit from the paddle. Then that Fn message will work again, but only once.

This is a clear pattern that he was able to reproduce over and over with certainty.

K1EL is not at fault. As he said, this is a problem in the Writelog application, releases 10.80 and after, on Windows 98 operating systems. (And yes, we have the correct FTDI driver installed for the two different operating systems.)

This is why I'm always so opposed to upgrading WL when things are all working solidly. 10.69D was like a rock.

K8ND: Can you report this to the Writelog police?

Thanks K6AM and 73,

- Geoff, W0CG, PJ2DX