I have had to write such things in the past at work; we often perform identical operations over {serial, pci, udp}. Serial is consistently a pain in the ass both for us and our users. There are too many things that can be slightly wrong, few ways to programatically tell what it is, and the only way to recover is to just get tired of going "hey! hello? is this thing on?" and start over. Mix in crappy chipsets, connections, cabling, or drivers and even when you have everything right it still goes south at random points.
It's always the easiest thing to get up and running on a prototype, though, so we can never get away from it. I think my favorite day of those kinds of projects is the day I realize no one's using the serial code anymore.
Hey! I design those devices! And our software isn't... well, okay. Maybe it is. But that is not my department. I have neither radio nor software, but if you are able to sniff and decipher the protocol (and it's probably a really simple protocol, given the age and the fact that it's serial), it shouldn't be too difficult (for me or a number of others on your friend list) to reimplement in a little OS X/Unix Open Source app.
I was going to suggest something similar (that I or another friend could write an app), but then I realized that I really absolutely didn't want to. :) I've worked on utilities like that, and there's a reason that they're mostly only developed by "a semicompetent nerd who hates humans" (a very apt description) -- it's annoying and painful to do, and nobody normal really wants to have anything to do with it.
That being said, if somebody else writes the backend code, I'd be willing to help out with front end CLI/GUI stuff.
I have a scanner which does digital modes and other crazy stuff and programming it via the keypad is a nightmare and/or impossible. So I'm stuck with shitty old windows software. There's a linux program someone did, I may even try running linux emulated to make this shit work
If it's a linux app, you could probably compile it for OSX without having to do emulation, couldn't you? If it won't compile, I wouldn't mind taking a look and seeing what has to happen to get it to build on my mac mini.
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It's always the easiest thing to get up and running on a prototype, though, so we can never get away from it. I think my favorite day of those kinds of projects is the day I realize no one's using the serial code anymore.
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That being said, if somebody else writes the backend code, I'd be willing to help out with front end CLI/GUI stuff.
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