FRAM71 and RS-232

[J-F Garnier]

Well, the HP 82164A can be set to 19200 bps maximum, about 2 kB/s.
The PIL-Box with lastest firmware (2.1) and 230 kbps setting should easily operate at an effective 1-1.5 kB/s transfer rate, but it may be interesting to compare with the 82164A in real transfer conditions (I didn't do it).

Keep in mind that this comparison assumes binary transfer. Binary transfer is trivial with the PIL-Box (using ROMCOPY is ok), but may not be with the HP82164, and if you do ASCII transfer in the form of hex dump files, the effective transfer rate with the 82164 will be reduced by at least a factor of 2, plus the overhead on HP-71 side to rebuild the binary content.

For binary transfer you will have to disable the software handshake and use hardware handshake with proper wiring, you can look at this document, although it's a long time since I used this interface (you can guess why :-)

You will also need some utility on PC side to send the binary file over RS232, I have no suggestion here.

J-F