telecom@ucbvax.UUCP (11/15/85)
I have been asked to get a 1200 baud smart modem for as little money as possible. Here is one that I found that sounds like a good deal, but is it? Modem: 1200 Baud Smart Duck Price: $169 + $6 P&H Available from: DAK Industries Inc. Winter 1986 catalog, page 9 Made by: ADC, division of BSR (Maybe I'm dumb, but what is ADC? -or BSR even, although the letters sound familiar.) Description: 1200 baud modem, Hayes compatible, with "more screen displays and a help menu", and "day, date and time, an extra phone jack and auto tone/pulse switching". Also has an auto-redial feature. Does anyone have this modem, and if so, how do you like it? Is it reliable? Does it differ from a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 in any way? Since we already have a Hayes, life would be easiest if the new one was Hayes compatible. If the above modem is no good, do you have any other suggestions? Please respond by mail. I will post a summary if there is worth while info. Thank you. -Douglas Flanagan Center for Applied Math Cornell U., Ithaca, N.Y. flanagan@amvax.tn.cornell.edu (ARPANET) flanagan%amvax@CRNLCS.BITNET (BITNET) {decvax,ihnp4,cmcl2,vax135}!cornell!amvax!flanagan (USENET)
DAP.TYM@OFFICE-1.ARPA (David Potter - McDonnell Douglas/AUGMENT Div.) (12/16/85)
EXT-Dave-Platt-LADC-8738T 6-Dec-85 DAK modem From: {Dave Platt <Dave-Platt%LADC@CISL-SERVICE-MULTICS.ARPA>}DDN To: DAP.TYM Posted: 6-Dec-85 17:40-EST Received: 6-Dec-85 20:13-EST Random-Quote: A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms. GEORGE WALD I saw the modem in the DAK catalog, and ordered it about a month ago. Un(?)fortunately, DAK gorfed up my Visa-card number when verifying it, got a "no authorization", and sent me a letter asking for a check or money order if I still wanted the modem. By then, I had heard the following, and decided not to get it after all: After ordering it, I mentioned having done so on a BBS I peruse frequently. Another BBS'er responded with a comment, saying that the ADC modem looks very much as if it's a private-label packaging of a modem made by a company here in California (I don't recall the company name, save that it starts with "L"; Levco, maybe???). He mentioned that this modem, and a whole bunch of others had recently been reviewed in one of the PC magazines; it received a very high bang-for-the-buck rating, but a fairly low absolute-level-of-quality rating. Apparently its ability to "hang onto" a low-quality signal is not very good (poor noise filtration, a simplistic decoding algorithm, or some such). It will apparently perform well when used to make local calls over high-quality phone lines, but tends to fall apart when used to make long-distance calls (especially, I'd guess, over some of the "alternate" long-distance carriers whose bandwidth / noise / echo suppression is not as good as AT&T & the better alternate carriers). DAK's owner mentioned in the ad that he noticed no difference between the ADC and the Hayes 1200 he'd been using... but if he was connecting mostly with database systems in the LA area (or with the local CompuServe or Tymnet access numbers) then his experience might not be a good indication of how it would perform in a more difficult environment. Please note - all of the above is third-hand news & rumor. I'd suggest that anyone seriously interested in the ADC modem dig through some back issues of the popular PC magazines (PC World, perhaps??) and see if you can find the article that compared the modems. Also, you might just go ahead and order the ADC modem from DAK, and see how it works in your application; DAK offers a 30-day no-questions-asked guarantee on everything they sell, and my experience with their various guarantees has been that they do keep their word. For now, I'm going to stick with my venerable Racal-Vadic VS212P modem. Its major shortcoming is that it's not Hayes-compatible (I understand that their new 300/1200/2400 "Maxwell" modem supports both Hayes and their own command sets). It has been very reliable in the 2+ years that I've owned it, and its noise immunity is very good; I do occasional cross-country XMODEM transfers with very few problems. 'nuff said. EXT-erickson-87766 8-Dec-85 Re: ADC Modem from DAK From: {Gary Scott Gershwin <erickson@UCI.EDU>}DDN To: DAP.TYM Cc: kaplan@UCI.EDU In-reply-to: Your message of 5 Dec 85 15:45 EST. Posted: 8-Dec-85 12:23-EST Received: 8-Dec-85 13:04-EST The ADC modem from DAK seems to be o.k. (I'm using it right now in fact) The only quirk I've seen in it is that once in awhile it will send a "{" to the screen but not to the system. However, I am going to change some of the hard- wiring in my terminal so that I can use the editors at UCI. That might solve the problem. Also, I noticed that the problem only happens when the line is interupted (it happened when someone picked up the receiver on one of the other phones in the house.) Other than that, It seems to be working just fine. Plus, it's got the auto-dial that can be used with such long distance companies as Sprint or MCI. It will dial one or several digits, wait for a second dial tone, then continue with the rest of the digits. It also redials if the line is busy, which can be handy for a student such as myself. All in all, it seems like a great deal for a 1200 baud modem. If you get one and find any peculiarities, please let me know. I'll do the same if you wish. GG <erickson@uci.edu> EXT-Dave-Platt-LADC-879M1 9-Dec-85 More on modems From: {Dave Platt <Dave-Platt%LADC@CISL-SERVICE-MULTICS.ARPA>}DDN To: DAP.TYM References-to: DAK modem Posted: 9-Dec-85 14:30-EST Received: 9-Dec-85 15:16-EST Random-Quote: If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT Here are a couple of tidbits that I've picked up while perusing several Macintosh-oriented bulleting-board systems across the country: - The Hayes 2400-baud Smartmodem is widely disliked. Its command set is *not* fully "Hayes-compatible"; the differences are sufficiently large that many of the popular bulletin-board-host programs (Fido, RBBS, maybe others?) have difficulty working with the modem. Also, it's alleged to be not very reliable at 2400 baud, and to be less than fully compatible with non-Hayes 2400-baud modems (filters mistuned, or something like that, maybe?). - The Courier 2400 has been getting rave reviews. This is due, in part, to the fact that Courier will sell one for a very low price ($350 or so) to anyone who will use it to support a bulletin-board system, as long as the sysop puts a message in the BBS signon dialog stating that the modem is courtesy of U.S. Robotics. It's also said to be rock-stable, with extremely good noise immunity and high reliability. It's also more compatible with the older (300- and 1200-baud) modems than the Hayes 2400 is! - I spoke with the sysop of the Socrates bulletin board (sent him copies of about 13 disks of public-domain Mac software, in fact). He is of the opinion that 2400-baud modems will probably be a fairly short-lived phenomenon in the marketplace. Newer protocols that will permit reliable operation at speeds of up to 9600 baud (or higher) over voice-grade lines will probably render 2400-baud modems obsolete before too long. As I understand it, these modems transmit bits in parallel by using a fairly large number of subcarriers, each of which transmits data at a relatively low rate (6-20 baud). These modems operate in a very fast "burst switching" mode; the phone line is actually used in a half-duplex fashion, but the modems switch back and forth fast enough (many times/second) that they appear to be full-duplex to the devices & people using them. They also regularly check the state of the phone line, testing to see which subcarriers can be used, and will automatically "roll back" to lower total baud rates if the quality of the phone connection decreases (they "roll back" smoothly, rather than in large steps, as the number of usable subcarriers decreases). The major limitation with these modems is that there is no standard protocol... just a number of incompatible proprietary ones. We'll probably have to wait a few years before a suitably efficient & accepted standard develops. EXT-kevin-879RM 9-Dec-85 ADC modem from DAK From: {kevin@harvard.HARVARD.EDU (Kevin Crowston)}DDN To: DAP.TYM, INFO-IBMPC@USC-ISIB.ARPA Posted: 9-Dec-85 16:29-EST Received: 9-Dec-85 16:33-EST I bought one of the ADC modems from DAK. I ordered by phone, paying by credit card, and the modem arrived within 3 weeks. So far, I have no complaints. It seems to be exactly what it claims, a Hayes compatible modem. It actually implements a superset of the Hayes commands, including such things as a built-in clock/calendar and automatic redialling on a busy signal. (It has a switch to turn these extensions off.) I've used the modem with MacTerminal on a Mac and it works fine. The documentation is very complete and readable and the modem worked "out of the box", with no setup. Overall, I would recommend it; it seems to be the cheapest modem on the market (or at least close). Kevin Crowston MIT Sloan School of Management kevin%mit-sloan.mit.edu@mit-mc.arpa kevin@harvard.arpa (P.S. I sent a slightly longer review to net.micro; perhaps, if you have access to that article, you might want to substitute it.)