West Mountain Radio - USB RIGblasters

USB - RIGblasters

Many new computers do not have serial ports thereby preventing their use with ham radio digital software.

So we now package a USB Interface Cable with our RIGblaster pro, RIGblaster Plus and RIGblaster nomic and refer to them as "USB RIGblasters." When sold separately the USB Interface Cable is offered at $.

The RIGblaster Plus pictured here is shown as an illustration of how the USB to Serial Port Adapter attaches to the existing serial port on the RIGblaster Plus. We use the standard serial cable that ships with all RIGblasters but we add the USB to Serial Port Adapter. When the USB Interface Cable is plugged into a USB connector on your computer, the Operating System (Windows) immediately discovers it and installs the driver software necessary to create an emulated COM port. You will need to know the number, eg: COM4, that is assigned to this emulated COM port so you can configure your software to match.

Much confusion exists about the USB and its use in connecting devices to a computer and it is important that you understand just what the USB is.

USB is an acronym for Universal Serial Bus. The key word here is "Bus". It is NOT a port, it is NOT a device, it IS a bus. Therefore a USB has to have some device attached to it to make it do anything useful.

If there were some USB device built that would provide Contact Sensing, Voltage Sensing, Output Contact Closures, Voltage Drivers and possibly even Analog to Digital and Digital to Aanalog converters, AND the authors of Amateur Radio Software would write software for that device, then we could imbed such a device inside a RIGblaster and put a USB connector right on the RIGblasters and it would be great.

However in the mean time, almost all Amateur Radio software is written to interface to a Serial Port (which is both a Port and a Device) and as such it doesn't matter if it is REAL or is emulated by a USB Interface Cable, a Serial Port IS required for this software.

Our USB Interface Cable is available under Other RIGblaster Accessories on the Pricing and Ordering pages of our web site for $. This adapter has limited support for FSK RTTY transmission. We have only found one arrangement where it will do RTTY/FSK and that is with MMTTY using the addin called EXTFSK. See our RTTY Links page for more on this.

RIGblaster Data Jack plug&play interfaces via a USB interface and connects via the rear panel of many radios. See the RIGblaster Data Jack Plug&Play Radio Compatibility Chart to see if your radio will work with a RIGblaster Data Jack plug&play.