I have been working with PDW for years with 2-level slicers off of serial ports to decode POCSAG and had excellent success. I am now trying to convert to new computer hardware, implementing multiple instances of PDW. I have one instance connected via a serial port to a 2 level slicer. It is working well. I have another instance connected via USB to one of the RS232/Slicer circuit boards obtained from Rene (Rene did the assembly and testing). I have not had any success using the new interface so I am looking for some advice on how to figure out what is wrong.
- I am using a Windows XP box with 4 CPUs running at 2.8GHz
- I see "Prolific USB-toSerial Comm Port (COM4)" in the device manager, so I think I have the USB to serial driver installed correctly
- I have tried two different receivers (using disc tap), both of which are successfully driving the "slicer" instance of PDW giving reliable decode of POCSAG 512
- I have the PDW interface set to Serial, COM4/Pocsag and RS232
- both of the dip switches on the RS232/Slicer board are set to off
- The options are set to "Enable Pocsag Decoding" and 512
- I am not getting any decode, but the little signal strength meter is wiggling slightly
- I shutdown PDW and started hyperterm on COM4 at 19200 (8-None-1). While no page is active, I get a steady stream of garbage. When a page is active, the stream of garbage characters does not appreciably change on the screen although the LED on the RS232 board does light up more brightly. If I disconnect the disc tap from the board, the stream of characters changes to what seems to be all spaces.
Does anyone have any ideas about how I might go about further debugging the problem?
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