Hi !

On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, NetBSD Bob wrote:
> OK, off-the-wall question for the gurus aboard......

*grin* interfaces to very strange things are my world...

> As a hobby, I run a fairly interesting Ham Radio station.  It is mostly
> antique radiotelegraphy stuff from the Korean war and earlier.

My callsign is DG2GMK, but i'm not active since a longer time due to lack of
enougn spare time between the job and collecting hardware.

[Morse-de/encoder]
> I would need to get access to ports that are not directly used
> by the system, so that timing would not be an issue.

If i understand you right, you want to let your machine spit out digital
signals to control some relay or the port of your transceiver directly.
On the other hand you want to get the acoustiv data from your transceiver
parsed by a program and printen on the screen. The most elegant way to get
this working would be a bit of the parallel port for the output to push the PTT
and a tone decoder giving you a digital signal, which could be connected to
another bit of your printer port. Output might be no problem, the timing is
slow enough, you could work with usleep() to get this working. Input should
work in a matter like the serial ports works, you have a timer running, and
do measurement of the input signal. As a long tone is the triple time of a
shor tone, you could check out some lenghts, and if you got 2 tones, where one
is more then twice as long as the other, take both, add them, divide the length
by 2, and take this as a timing to calculate the lengts by looking for SHORTER
tones and LONGER tones. the pauses go similar to this. Input is a bit harder,
but just listen for some "beeps", get the number of beeps of a very fast
guy, multiply this by about 4-8, and take this as a "scan timing" for your
input port.

This could be a good start to create a little program talking to input and
output signals of the parallel printer port of the most supported platforms.
FreeBSD has a very nice interface for such things, in NetBSD you might want
to look at the ioctl's of the printer port interface.

So, you just need to be able to write a bit of C program to do all those
thing above :-)

Just a spontaneus idea flowing through my head for this.

To get more detailed, we should do it off the lists i think, you should decide
which platform you want to use for your plans. I know the architecture of the
i386 port, maybe it is possible with the other platforms also.

...Michael

-- 
void windows() { while(status == SYS_RUNNING) { sleep(rand()); bluescreen(); }}