RE: DCS300 -- MIDRANGE-L

I guess you answered my question.   We are trying to be pushed to the
new technology / hardware for 2.4,  which is a total rewiring and new
devices etc....   We would like to stay with all of our existing
equipment,  just switch to the DCS300 to communicate directly with the
AS/400 and get rid of the pc part,  and start designing our own
programs.  

Bottom line - we don't want to spend a lot of money right now to change
to a direct as/400 connection from our rf devices.  Therefore I wanted
to see if there were people still using this DCS300 technology and if it
was still working fine for them.   This will allow us to complete this
project at a very low cost  VS  a whole hardware conversion.

Thank you for your help!!


-----Original Message-----
From: George Kinney [mailto:GKinney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Friday, May 28, 2004 10:49 AM
To: 'midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: RE: DCS300

We've used such a setup for some of our scanners for 6+ years now.
(Well, it
was a DSC200 originally, replaced 3 years ago.)

I'm not sure what you want to know, but it works very well. Simple to
setup,
little to no maintenance required (the box runs OS/2). The only time we
even
interact with it is to push the occassional software update to the
scanners.
Otherwise, it sits on a shelf gathering dust. It has *never* gone down
for
any reason other than the occassional extended power failure we suffer
out
here. In fact, we IPL our iSeries more often than we reboot the
controller.
(Which is practically never too.)

The entire configuration backs up on a single floppy disk, activating a
backup controller is as simple as sticking the floppy in and clicking
'Restore Config'.  Configuration itself is a simple point-and-click
affair,
one controller can handle comms with many hosts, different protocols,
etc. 

These things support some pretty sophisticated functions (terminal
scraping,
scripting, etc.), but we don't use them, just straight VTXX and 5250
connections to various hosts. (SCO and OS/400 in our case)

All that said, our DSC300 is considered a legacy device here, we went to
direct-ip, 802.11, etc for new purchases years ago, but we still have
older
units on the floor, so it will be with us for the forseeable future.
Which
is fine by me.


----

    We currently use a bar code scanner from intermec but we use a
"middle man" concept where the data is sent from the RF devices to a PC,
validated against the as/400 and then sent to the as/400.    We would
like to get rid of this middle man concept.   I know there is a dcs300
controller that will allow the scanners and as/400 to talk directly.  We
are looking at purchasing a used one and I guess trying this out as a
"proof of concept"  that this will work this way and is just as reliable
or more than the existing way.   This will allow us to bring the
programming in house since it is just a 5250 RPG programming.  

 

What I would like to know is anyone using this and what do you think of
this way.  I know the current technology is to move forward with the 2.4
mhz from the 900 mhz.  We will move that way eventually as we will be
doing another RF project in the next year and the new section will have
2.4   but for now if we could just cut out the middle man pc we would be
happy.  Then eventually upgrade this section,  but the programming would
already be inplace it would just be hardware.

 

If anyone has any thoughts/ comments let me know.
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