[WT-support] Win-Test vs. WinKeyer USB

[Bob Wilson, N6TV]

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 8:56 PM, Rick Tavan N6XI <rtavan at gmail.com> wrote:

> At an integration exercise for P40L WW CW, I had some trouble with WinKeyer
> USB vs. Win-Test on a specific Win XP Pro computer. With computer-sent code
> only, the second and subsequent letters of a word have distorted dots.


I worked with N6XI to debug this problem last night.  The fix was:

   1. WKSETUP [Enter]
   2. Change PTT Tail from 50 to 0 (PTT lead was already 0)
   3. Enable WinKey2 additional features (check)
   4. Fixed tail

Apparently the WinKey "PTT Tail" does not work well with the way that
Win-Test sends ASCII characters to the WinKey.  Win-Test sends one character
at a time.  Apparently, during the PTT tail time, the WinKey2 will not send
any CW.  The result is that if you send P40L at 36 WPM, the first dot of the
4 is clearly truncated.  I cannot explain it completely, but setting PTT
Tail to 0 fixed the problem.  The Win-Test default is 50ms for both PTT lead
and PTT tail time.  I think this number is way too big.  8 ms lead time is
plenty for most modern amplifiers.  PTT "hang" time can be controlled with
CW VOX delay in the radio.  I believe the Win-Test default should be 0, not
50.

Note that Win-Test currently has very limited support for the new features
of the WinKey2 chip.  For example, there is no direct support for keying
compensation, first character lengthening, sidetone and PTT at the same
time, etc.  Since hardly anyone is using WinKey1 chip these days, it seems
like Win-Test's WinKey support code is quite out of date.

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 10:35 PM, Peter Stuge <peter at stuge.se> wrote:

> I know USB fairly well and I'm really sad to see FTDI chips being
> used so widely, especially in applications where other chips could
> offer great benefits, admittedly also requiring more USB knowledge
> and development, but it's very unfortunate that it's so rare to take
> advantage of all USB has to offer.
>

First, Peter, what is your callsign?

Consensus in the ham community is that the FTDI chipset is the BEST that you
can get, and that the Prologic chipset is to be avoided at all costs.  I
suspect this is probably the result of bad Prologic driver software, not bad
chip hardware.  Now I know why.

But the bottom line is that N6XI's issue was not a USB problem, but a WinKey
and Win-Test incompatibility problem.

73,
Bob, N6TV
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