Virtual COM Ports

Using Virtual Serial Port Emulator (VSPE)

If you want to control PowerSDR with any other application, or you'd like to have PowerSDR update your logging program with your operating frequency and mode etc. you need either a set of real serial ports and a serial cable between the ports or you could choose a more elegant solution and use a pair of virtual serial ports.

I've been using VSPE for quite a while now with a few Programs, the likes of SpectraVue, DxLabs, HRD, Fldigi, and now also with PowerSDR.

It is quite intuitive and easy to use.

First check with Windows what serial ports it currently thinks it has. Use Device Manager to get that info, because we do not want to use a serial port that is currently under the control of Windows.

Mine looks like this:

As you can see quite a few are in use. So to connect DxLab to PowerSDR I've setup a PAIR of virtual serial ports in VSPE,  COM12 <=> COM13.

Next go into the Setup Menu of PowerSDR and select the CAT Control Tab and then select COM13 (or COM12 if you like), make a note of the Baud, Parity, Data and Stop values and check the Enable CAT check box to enable the CAT port.

Next we need to setup DXLab. Open Commander Configuration and under the General tab in the Radio section select SDR-5000.

And then select the Ports tab and in the Primary CAT Serial Port section select Port# 12 (or 13 if you've chosen 12 for PowerSDR) and set up the Baud, Word, Parity and Stop values according to the values that we've set up for PowerSDR.

Well, that's it. DxLabs and PowerSDR should now sync their details, i.e. Frequency and Mode. So logging and spotting should now be working fine.

If you like to use Fldigi with PowerSDR and would like to sync Frequency and Mode, all we need to do is add another virtual serial port pair to VSPE and then use the CAT+ tab under the CAT Control Tab in PowerSDR.

There you can add three more CAT controls.

As you can see I have added two more CAT controls and I use the CAT3 Control for Fldigi. Open the Fldigi configuration and select the Rig Tab and then the RigCAT tab.

Select the Use RigCAT tick box. For the Rig description file select PowerSDR.xml, if you do not have the file you'll need to download it form here.

Make sure that the Device is set to the other virtual COM Port, in my case I selected COM21 in PowerSDR and COM20 in Fldigi. Same rules as before make sure the Baud rate and Stopbits are the same and because we are using Virtual Serial Ports, we check the VSP enable check box.

That's it. Yep it is that easy.