On Thu, 22 Dec 2016 12:25:55 -0500, Ron Hardin wrote:
How do I send and receive ascii on a USB serial
port?

It's to and from a Drake R8B shortwave receiver,
and just to set the time of day etc, twice a year.

It would be nice if it just appeared as a device
like an external HD that I can write to and read
from.

I'm using Cygwin under XP, so if it has a device
name presumably I can just send text to it and
read text from it, but I have no idea how it comes
up.

Maybe I need what's referred to as a terminal
program, but I don't know what that means.

I've read the Drake R8B manual.

http://wayback.archive.org/web/20150905113244/http://www.rigpix.com/drake/r8b_manual.pdf

The details for the receiver's serial port interface is described on page
27-30.

It's similar like communicating with the old phone-line modem through serial
port, so you can use Hyper Terminal included in Windows XP. If your PC don't
have any serial port, get yourself a serial port adapter USB device.

The data used is plain text and can be inputted directly from the keyboard.
e.g. the command to change AGC setting to "Slow" is "AS", so type "A", "S",
then ENTER.