scanSydney

Anyone had any success with Uniden scanners and using a serial splitting app like XPort? Essentially it should allow you to have multiple apps accessing the scanner simultaneously, such as ID Tracker III & bcTool at the same time.

The trouble I have is when I load either ID Tracker or bcTool to use the serial ports provided by XPort... Windows blue screens and causes the machine to reboot.

are you talking about multiple serial ports controlling multiple scanners or having one physical serial port controlling multiple scanners via some virtual stuff ?

No - I'm talking of mutliple applications accessing the one serial port simultaneously.

Typically when a serial port is in use by one application, the port is locked and access by further applications is not permitted.

My objective is to run ID Tracker and stream to icecast with ID3 tags.

I have never heard of this, nor thought it was possible. I would be interested to see how this goes. Personally I think that giving each device its own port would be a safer option.

i'd have to agree there soupbones, asking two devices to access one serial port is playing with fire...

if it were two devices wanting to access one usb port then i'd say you may have a greater chance of success since usb is alot newer technology than the old serial port

You guys are a confused about what criten needs. He doesn't was to run multiple devices on the one serial port - he wants to run multiple applications from the one serial port.

So basically, he wants to split the port so the one scanner that is connected can be used by multiple programs at the same time.

A quick search through Google shows there are a quite a few programs out there which would achieve this - that Xport being one of them. When you set up the applications that you want to use with the serial port make sure they are connected to different 'virtual ports' that are created by whatever splitting program you are using, not the physical port. This may be what is causing your BSOD

Scotty

Scotty wrote:You guys are a confused about what criten needs

Indeed

Scotty wrote: When you set up the applications that you want to use with the serial port make sure they are connected to different 'virtual ports' that are created by whatever splitting program you are using, not the physical port. This may be what is causing your BSOD

Definately using the correct virtual ports. Might be more related to the fact I'm running XP under Sun VirtualBox. I think I'll try a native XP machine sometime this weekend.

criten wrote:Definately using the correct virtual ports. Might be more related to the fact I'm running XP under Sun VirtualBox. I think I'll try a native XP machine sometime this weekend.

Could be. I'm no computer expert though!

If you do get it working let us all know. Like you I would love to be able to run multiple scanner applications at once.

criten wrote:

Scotty wrote:You guys are a confused about what criten needs

Indeed

Scotty wrote: When you set up the applications that you want to use with the serial port make sure they are connected to different 'virtual ports' that are created by whatever splitting program you are using, not the physical port. This may be what is causing your BSOD

Definately using the correct virtual ports. Might be more related to the fact I'm running XP under Sun VirtualBox. I think I'll try a native XP machine sometime this weekend.

Umm, yeah that would probly be it as from what i understand Sun VirtualBox is like VMWARE..

I thought either way. Still, serial ports sometimes get return data from the application that is using them ( though not always ). So I would have thought running two of anything usually is not a great idea with a serial port. If the application only accepts data and not send any back tot he port then I suppose it would be ok if that was the case.
Personally I would not go there. USB - serial converters are cheap as at the moment and USB allows you to run several on one port with a hub if thats all you have.