NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/hardware-part1/1817

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Path: news.delphi.com!usenet
From: [e-mail] (Joanne Dow)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc,comp.sys.amiga.hardware,comp.sys.amiga.applications
Subject: Re: Modem disconnecting
Date: 20 Jan 1996 05:26:54 GMT
Organization: Delphi Internet Services Corporation
Message-ID: <4dpueu$[e-mail]>
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Reply-To: [e-mail] (Joanne Dow)
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In article <4d63sm$[e-mail]>, Jeff Grimmett <[e-mail]> wrote:
>[e-mail] (Joanne Dow) wrote:
>
>>This does not accord with the reviews I have read. In point of fact those
>>reviews placed Practical Peripherals right dead at the bottom in regards to its
>>ability to establish a connection.
>
>Que pasa, using one (albeit important) category to base one's overall
>evaluation of a modem on?  Aside from the fact that I've seen this in
>only one omnibus comparison (Telephony Journal, c. last 3-4 months),
>there are a few other criteria that might be of interest.  That's why I
>explicitly SAID "overall".  I could have mentioned the criteria important
>to ME, but my work here requires more than anyone's likely to need from a
>modem.

Comments made privately to me by a fellow who owns a testing lab and the several
months ago review of the cheaper 28.8kbps modems that appeared in Computer
Shopper are the things that I base comments upon. (The 14.4 beasties are
COMPLETELY different from the 28.8 in most cases when compariing quality.)

>At any rate, the Sportster SI's I've looked at thus far are pretty much
>run of the mill connection wise... as were the Supras and two of the
>three PPs (let us NOT talk about the AT&Ts).  One INTERESTING thing that
>I have found is that of the three in question, both the USR and PP
>immediately started degrading, to the point that they were useless to me
>after three months (again, I have tight tolerances).  The Supra was
>degrading, too, but not as fast.  Unfortunately, it got tossed for other
>reasons (the case acts like a waveguide...)

Hm, I do have a PP 9600SA here that worked for me very nicely for many months
and then began to deteriorate. I traced it down to an electrolytic capacitor
that was going bad. I replaced it with a good capacitor and the modem has worked
sort of adequately since then. I wonder if this is becoming an endemic problem
in the modem industry. (Someone else with a similar model PP reported back to me
that his had the same capacitor problem. Sample of two - but it seems
indicative. Failure mode was increasing difficulty making connections over a
several month period - as if the lines got progressively noisier.)

Except for this excursion into 9600bps modems all I have discussed before were
28.8 models. They all seem to have different chip sets in them than do the 14.4
and slower models.

>
>>Meanwhile comp.dcom.modems is an interesting newsgroup.
>
>For some reason I haven't seen any traffic in there since connecting.
>What's the daily average?

It was up in the several hundred messages a day range when I was following it.

{^_^}     Joanne Dow, Amiga Exchange Editor on BIX, aka The Wizardess
          [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail]