From: meg@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Meg Geddes)
Subject: Re: Word of Advice
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 02:23:41 GMT
Organization: The Programmer's Pit Stop, Ann Arbor MI

In article <1992Aug26.160322.4763@random.ccs.northeastern.edu> alansar@ccs.northeastern.edu (Mohammad Al-Ansari) writes:
>
>Would you please elaborate on what you mean by "none have worked"?  I have
>one of those Supra's and so far it works fine.  I'd like to hear about
>the specific areas you're having problems with.

I don't know about the person to whom you were responding, but I can tell
you about MY problems with them.  I'm the one who went through four of 'em
before I got one that worked.

The first one came from a distributor.  Had a power problem.  The main 
reason I bought the thing (apart from the price) was that I had been using
a Supra 2400 for a long time and never had a lick of trouble with it.
Anyway, I switched the power supply and it *still* didn't work - instead
of coming up with OK on the LED, it either didn't come up with anything, 
or came up with solid dots.  Decided to deal with Supra direct, and called
them for a cross ship RMA, which I got a couple of days later.

Second one semi-worked for about two days.  Seemed to have flow control
problems.  I managed to make about a half dozen polls with UUPC/Extended
before it gave up the ghost entirely.  Likewise, I could make a connection
okay with Procomm or Telix, and about ten minutes into the session (usually
when I was sitting at a MORE prompt or something) I'd get mondo dropped
chars, garbage chars, stuff that was obviously not line noise.  I kept this
one for a couple of weeks before I was finally satisfied that it wasn't ME
that was the problem, and called Supra for another cross-ship RMA.  Which
I got, with no problem.

Third one had basically the same problem as the second, except that it 
never worked at all.  By this time I was taking the thing into work and
running it on every computer in sight.  Switched cables.  Switched I/O
cards.  Took out the 16550 and put the 16450 back in (it was a long shot
but any port in a storm)  Wouldn't make a connection worth beans no matter
what I did.  This time I got a Supra person on the voice phone with me 
and let him listen to the thing at the time it tried to make a connection.
He said it definitely sounded like a sick modem.  Time for RMA #3.   This
time they wanted to charge me an extra $20 or something for the privilege
of getting another modem before I returned their broken one.  (The policy
had apparently changed while I was in the midst of all these RMA's)  After
some feetstamping on my part, and a pointed remark or two about how I had
had THREE bad modems so far and as far as I was concerned the onus was now
on THEM to make ME happy, they waived the fee.  I normally would have given
up at this point and waited till I had more money on hand to buy a different
modem, but by now this was some kind of a quest.

The fourth one worked out of the box.  Mostly.  I still have a problem with
it deciding to reset or do something strange every two or three days.  
Since I run a <mostly> unattended uucp machine which polls close to two
dozen systems either hourly or every 3 hours, this is something of a pain.
I will come home from work and the LED will be stuck on DI and the OH and
TR lights will be on when it's obviously not dialing anything, and the 
logs will show "modem failed to initialize" for every poll.  I still don't
know what causes this to happen, but it occurs every few days.  Only way
out of it is power-down, power-up.  If the mystical and (so far) mythical
"new roms" show up anytime soon, and solve the problem, I'll be relatively
happy despite my ordeal.  (After all, I got it pretty cheap)  If they don't
show, or if they show and don't help, then something is going to hit the
fan, and it ain't gonna just be this modem.

Summing up, it is my considered opinion that Supra V.32bis modems are not
for the faint of heart.

-- 
Meg Geddes      <No admitted affiliation with anything>    Ann Arbor, MI                       
meg@netmeg.ann-arbor.mi.us
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems