What's even stranger... I bought this HW off EBay a while back (and it
works well enough, for a beta type poorly designed high school
project). Anyway, on one of the calls to them, I was told to not use
the HW, but just plug the card in directly. The tech support claim was
that the HW was originally part of some big security thing, but is no
longer required. Indeed, it doesn't really seem to make any
difference.

All they really care about is that you have the SW subscription.

Plug the card into what?

Ron Lee