Hi,

Just to clarify. I am pretty good at working with the Windows Device
Manager and I know I installed the provided drivers. The USB to serial
adapter I bought (I can't find a brand marking on it) does not work with any
soaring instrument.

I will try the Belkin one recommended by Dave Nadler. Hopefully that will
get my friend connected to his Colibri.

Good Soaring,

Paul Remde

"Darryl Ramm" wrote in message
...
On Feb 23, 11:07 am, jcarlyle wrote:
I stand corrected! What I was trying to do was to try and prevent
someone not as well versed as you to buy a USB serial adapter, plug it
into Windows running as the sole OS, and then wonder why his DOS
program wouldn't talk to his SN10. Naturally, there are many ways to
skin a cat - especially if you are a computer expert.

-John

On Feb 23, 1:54 pm, Darryl Ramm wrote:

I could not resist the ONLY in caps. That would be only EXCEPT if you
run Windows (or even real MS-DOS) within a VMware virtual machine with
the USB-serial adapter running on the host OS. Then the software in
the virtual machine won't care and cannot tell there is a USB adapter
involved.



Your advice was great. My expectation is that many users have problems
with USB adapters, even with plain Windows apps. And many of those
users will give up because dealing with Windows device management is
too hard and they did not realize they probably needed to load
drivers.

In Mac land, the Keyspan is one of the few (only mainstream?) USB
adapter that has driver support. It works but has a few bugs (The
Keyspan driver can panic OS X if I do unnatural things to the device
at very high baud rates, much faster than any flight computer can
talk. It has never failed in normal use). I have notes on using this
and debugging general serial port things that I keep meaning to finish
and post on my blog.

Darryl

(Who remembers writing MACRO-11 and FORTAN code to talk to DHV11
serial muxes on RT-11. And is now feeling old.)