Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2003 22:56:49 EST From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: USB/Serial Connection on L100
Latest report: A few weeks ago I installed a Belkin USB2 PCMCIA card on my L100, mainly for purposes of digicam downloading, but also for general screwing around. A few days ago I bought on ebay a Garmin USB/serial cable (or maybe adapter, as the cable is only about 4" long.) The thought was to more easily configure the world's greatest traveling PC for GPS use. I have a PCMCIA/serial card, but the cable is really wimpy and I distrust it, although it works flawlessly. The USB/serial cable's serial connector has Link, TX, and RX LEDs which is handy. It came with one of the mini-CDRs with drivers for W98se, W2K, XP, ME, and Mac. Software installed nicely, it autodetected the operating system (W98se on the L100) and copied the needed drivers to a Windows directory. When the cable was plugged in to the USB2 card, Windows configured the driver(s) with no intervention. Slick. Even better than that, this daisy chain rig works for both Street Atlas 8 and Fugawi 3.04. I won't pretend to understand how this works, but a virtual serial port appears to be created. It shows up under Device Mgr>Ports as Serial on USB (COM2). Under USB Controllers in Device Mgr is an additional listing: USB to Serial Interface Controller (by Magic Control Technology Corp. - MCT, who actually builds these.) I tried repeatedly unplugging and replugging both the USB connection and the serial connection (to my Garmin Etrex GPS) and no bad things happened! Seems to be fairly robust so far. There are varying reports on GPS-related sites about incompatibilty with XP and also MS software products, especially Mappoint. I hope to use this with MS Autoroute (fingers crossed for another European vacation) so will try that soon. Price for this cable varies *wildly* - one GPS site showed a price of $250. I got lucky on ebay and paid $12.50. Garmin charges about $30 I think. Lee ************************************************************** http://libretto.basiclink.com - Libretto mailing list http://www.silverace.com/libretto/ - Archives -------TO UNSUBSCRIBE------- Reply to any of the list messages. The reply mail should be addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Then replace any text on the message's subject line: cmd:unsubscribe --------TO UNSUBSCRIBE DIGEST------ Do above but with this on subject line: cmd:unsubscribe digest **************************************************************
