[Coco] DW4/Prolific USB/Xubuntu 13.10 Fail

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 26 December 2013 12:20:52 Bruce W. Calkins did opine:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Tormod Volden"
> 
> > On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 5:41 AM, Joel Ewy wrote:
> >> I have one of these USB/Serial thingies.  It's a Prolific -- cheap
> >> and sucky, but Aaron says they work for him, right?  (I also want to
> >> get it
> > 
> > I have tested many USB-serial adapters and some of them do suck. For
> > my Dragon adapters I initially tried to use PL2303 (Profilic), but
> > gave up on them and now consistently use CP2102 (Silicon Laboratories)
> > ones instead which all seem to work very reliable. However I have had
> > excellent experience with some PL2303 adapters at work (running 24/7
> > for years on Linux machines), so these seem to be a mixed bag. I think
> > I have read something about pirated PL2303 clones and Profilic giving
> > up on the PL2303 series because of the bad reputation they
> > (undeservedly) got.
> 
> ====================
> 
> FWIW: the amatuer radio community has found issues with the Prolific
> clone USB/Serial adapters.  For Windows you need to roll back the
> driver. Generally there are fewer problems with Linux systems.
> Bruce W.
> 
But their reputation for throwing away or at times just scrambling the 
first byte of a packet runs down the road in front of them carrying a huge 
warning sign. Lots of UPS's will output a slow march of data, taking 2 or 3 
seconds to complete their status report, sent at 9600 baud from a db9 
connector on the UPS. Connect the UPS to a usb port and run a hex dump of 
what comes out of the port.  Its pure garbage that no known, nut or 
otherwise upsd daemon can track.  Swap it for one based on the FDTI chips, 
and it works perfectly.  For the same reason its worthless as a heyu to 
CM-11A linkage to control your X-10 stuff, you either use an FDTI, or a 
real serial port.

Cheers, Gene
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