Best posts made by dpcons

This problem has been resolved. It appears my ANKER 10 port USB Hub is the problem. It's associated with the lower 4 ports of the hub. The remaining 6 are OK. I'm not sure what the actual problem is yet. The hub has a 60W power supply attached so I doubt it's a power issue...maybe noise? I now have a 10 port Amazon Hub which works well. As for the DTR signal, I've always used it and have seldom used the reset buttons. Also, I think most of the Arduinos and clones have it implemented through the serial convertor chip as well. It's also on all the ESP32 and ESP 8266 clones I've used. Again, thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions.

I tested the Advanced Web Server Sample with this setup. Works fine. I tried the GatewayESP8266 on this setup and another setup with a WEMOS Pro mini. Same results, nothing out the serial port. I also tried the gateway app on an esp8266 with no radio attached and got no serial at 115200 at all. Is this normal? Shouldn't I get some kind of error message.
I'll try setting up an app to talk to the RF24 directly and see how that goes.
Is the GatewayESP32 working for the RF24 radios? If so, maybe I'll try that. I'm quite puzzled.
This assembly worked at one time a couple of years ago on another system.