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APPLICATIONS
Truckers
Stay in Touch with Data over Voice Radio
Whether
hauling a load from the warehouse to the distributor or making
deliveries all over town, truckers have always been in the lead when it
comes to communications. They were using two-way radios long before the
CB craze in the 1970s and have been at the forefront of digital
communications as well.
One US firm
realized that trucking companies and other companies with mobile workers
can't afford to put satellite dishes on the roof of every service or
delivery vehicle. But most vehicles have two-way radios. So they saw the
opportunity to create wireless data networks to extend corporate
applications into the field.
On their
network, text or binary data from a mobile radio is picked up by a modem
and passed through a wireless server to the LAN at the base station. A
good deal of network programming went into the initial system which ran
on a DOS machine. Due to the growth in network traffic and a need for
multitasking, they switched from DOS to OS/2.
 "We
had written a lot of the low level code to move the data through the
different network layers," explains their principal engineer.
"From radio to modem to wireless server to LAN, and each step
requires bit-by-bit knowledge of the hardware. We were going to have to
rewrite the interface between the communications co-processor and DOS,
so the co-processor would talk to OS/2. It was going to be a big
job."
That's when
they discovered the qCF programming tools from Quadron Corporation. In
their opinion, "qCF takes the sting out of software development for
communication cards."
Communication
cards from Quadron are specifically designed to increase a PC's speed
and efficiency. These cards are equipped with their own CPU, additional
memory and input / output lines. "By putting the co-processors
between the modems and the wireless server we can manage more data
streams at the same time. With qCF, we can access the disk directly from
the cards. That speeds up the whole process," added their engineer.
The best
part was using qCF, instead of porting all the interface code from the
DOS system. "qCF gave us all the low level communications code we
needed to get the network up and running in record time." They
admit it would have taken significantly longer to port, debug and test
the software without qCF. "Even with other tools we couldn't have
done it as fast. The Quadron tools let you develop faster with fewer
errors. In the long run, it means we can add new features sooner than we
had planned."
The firm's
customers and resellers are happy about the switch as well. "Now we
can do high level programming right on the card. That means the overall
throughput is faster, because the wireless server doesn't have to do all
the interrupt-driven network protocol work," says their principal
engineer. "The information ends up getting through to the
customer's LAN faster and that makes everybody happy."
He is also
happy with the service he gets from Quadron, "None of the problems
or bugs I had came from Quadron, but they were real helpful when I
didn't understand something. They have real good support and when I had
questions, they were ready with the answers."
"I'd
recommend using communications cards and Quadron's qCF to anybody who
wants to write their networking software faster and improve their system
processing speeds." |