trouble accessing comm port

[ki4ccz]

Hey guys,

After several years my old HP laptop broke and I bought several toshiba 2515cds and a IBM 380d thinkpad thinking they would work. All have the same pentium 1 and 16 mb ram that my HP had but all of them have trouble accessing comport. I am using a genuine rib with homemade cables. I am trying to reprogram my gr300 that I previously programmed with the old HP. I had to replace the harddrives and reinstall windows 98.

ANY help please?

Jeremy

[wavetar]

Check in the bios and turn off any IR ports, as they can conflict with the serial port. It's a common issue in the IBM's at least.

[ki4ccz]

Tried this but whenever I try to read the radio, in the upper left corner of the GM300 program screen, I get "Accessing Serial Port" and it just continues to try to find port. As far as I know I have all IR ports disabled on both the IBM and Toshiba. All are doing the same thing.

Jeremy

[wavetar]

Have you verified the RSS isn't set for COM2 maybe?

[ki4ccz]

The com port is set to com 1. I also went into the device manager and made sure that is were the serial port was.

Jeremy

[Astro Spectra]

If you can run Win95, run hyper terminal and short pins 2 and 3 of the serial port together and see if you have a loopback OK. If you can only do DOS, put a volt meter or scope on the com port output and copy a large file to the com port <copy example.text com1> and see if there is anything being sent. If that's OK then try the reverse <copy com1 con> wiggle the com port input (another PC, signal gen 1kHz +/- 3V or more, or just touch a wire on it sometimes works) and see if you get random characters on the screen. If all that checks out then check your cables.

[ki4ccz]

I know my cables work because I have used them to read the radio with the broke computer (the case is cracked and fragile but still operational) but I will try your suggestion. Will hyper terminal work in windows 98 that is all I have. Thanks for the suggestions and I will let you all know what happens.

Jeremy

[Astro Spectra]

Win98 is better!