rick@seismo.UUCP (Rick Adams) (07/13/85)
I have spent the last 2 weeks evaluating a US Robitics Courier 2400 modem. I have beat on it pretty severly and can't find anything wrong with it. We are buying several. I like it well enough that I will probably buy myself one for home use. The modem was used for uucp traffic on seismo for 2 weeks. It was used for both dialins and dialing out. The ONLY problem I could find with it is that if you try and call another site at 2400 baud and it can only sync up at 1200, the modem prints "CONNECTED 1200" and then resets the baudrate to the host to 1200 baud. I added 5 lines of code to the dialer in uucp and have had no problems since. I consider this to be minor. Anyway, on to details. The GSA cost is $399 quantity 1. If you are not on the GSA scale (i.e. if you don't buy as a US government agency), you can still get it at this price by mentioning you heard about this price from The Center for Seismic Studies (i.e. where I work). The list price on this model is $895 and the regular non-GSA price is $479 (other dealers may charge more). The modem operates at 300/1200/2400 baud (Bell 103/Bell212A/CCITT V22.bis) in both originate and answer mode. It will fall back to 1200 from 2400, but not from 1200 to 300 in orignate mode and correctly autobaud in answer mode. A nice (and undocumented feature) is that the modem will detect what baudrate the computer is sending at and use that as the dialout speed. This means you can just list the same modem in your L-devices file 3 times with different speeds and not change anything else. [it's simpler than it sounds if you are confused] In orignate mode, it will detect (with a serate message for each) ringing, busy, dialtone, and voice (and hang up on a voice). It uses a superset of the HAYES SMARTMODEM command set. I used the unmodified Hayes driver for a while before changing it to also handle the USR extensions. It also claims to be able to be used with CrossTalk, SmartCom and PC-Talk communications software, but I was unable to test this. (I presume it will work, as it looks like a hayes) It does pulse or tone dialing and if tone dialing doesn't get rid of the dialtone, it will try pulse dialing. The warranty is 2 years from US Robotics. The dealer will also handle warranty repairs (by sending you a working one and sending yours off to the factory.) The 1200 baud performance was much, much better than our Racal-Vadic MACS dialers. We were able to connect to sites with the USR modem that we could not get to with the Vadic modem. There was very little noise at 2400 baud and virtually none at 1200. I successfully connected at 2400 baud to ATT, Concord Data Systems, Vadic and USR 2400 baud modems, so there is no interoperability problem. This also worked at 2400 baud on our ITT WATS lines which are much, much noiser than ATT WATS (then again, they are also much cheaper, you get what you pay for). I expected it to have problems with the noisy ITT lines, but it worked perfectly. I wasn't able to give it the acid test of trying to use Sprint, but then nothing works on Sprint reliably... Physically, it's 6" x 10" x 1". It's a very nice, low profile modem. The dealer is the major east cost distributer for US Robotics and has many units in stock. We received ours within days of placing the order. The $399 price is ONLY available from the following dealer. Any other dealer will probably charge you more. The dealer is: Advanced Data Products, Inc. 18974 Bonanza Way (B-3) Gaithersburg, MD 20879 (301) 424-9490 The salesmans name is: Don Parnell You can probably pay for the cost of the modem in the savings in a few months phone charges. It sounds too good to be true, but I've got a couple in the computer room proving they are real. ---rick