Equinox question

[Chip Rosenthal]

In article <1991Feb13.170319.13308 at virtech.uucp>
	cpcahil at virtech.UUCP (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
>In article <27B79130.5C72 at telly.on.ca>
	evan at telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes:
>>[Someone said that Megaport serial cards] won't do hardware flow control
>>and modem control on the same port at the same time.
>
>That is correct.

Conor...are you sure about that?  I use the Equinox boards.  I've done
just about everything you can do with them except high-speed dialin/dialout
modems.  According to the manual - it does work.  But I won't state that
unequivocally since I haven't tried that one item.

The way you get it is a little bit tricky.  The Megaport cards provide a
pair of control signals per port.  It is up to the distribution box to
route them to the appropriate pins, and the driver to interpret them as
the appropriate RS-232 signals.  So, normally you can get DSR/DTR or
RTS/CTS per port.  If you need both pairs, you need to steal the control
signal pair from an adjacent port.  Megaport provides a utility which
configures this.

The tricky part is that you can't steal signals from any arbitrary port
and place them on any other arbitrary port.  Half the ports are predesignated
as potential donors, and a donor can only give its control signals to one
particular port.  Therefore, you need to exercise a little forethought
before hooking things up.

This scheme is not pretty, but it is usable in most cases.  Since most folks
use a three-wire connection for terminals, you usually have an abundance
of control signals to steal.  If however, you are trying to drive a bank
of high speed modems with full modem control, or you like to bring DTR
out to your terminals, then this board is not appropriate.

BTW...the Megaport manual has an appendix on how to hookup up the Telebit.
I've also found their support folks to be pretty good - you might want
to give them a holler with any questions.

So again, on paper, the Megaport looks like it will do what Evan wants.
However, I concede to not testing it first-hand.  Please correct me if
I'm overlooking something, or if things don't work quite the way they are
documented.

-- 
Chip Rosenthal  512-482-8260  |
Unicom Systems Development    |    I saw Elvis in my wtmp file.
<chip at chinacat.Unicom.COM>    |