Montioring COM Port

[xenwalker]

Ok I am sending flight information out from Microsoft flight sim X through FSUIPC to COM1 (Witch is the only way the program will allow) I Know for a fact that information is being sent I found a freeware program that can monitor COM1 and there is Data confirmed.  I have written some simple code through Visa to open up the Com port on the same computer as "MFS" and it always says it cannot open up the port because it is in use. I only want to read the information from the port and I am very confused on how I go about just reading the COM information rather than trying to grab the port.  Note: I have tried restarting to clear the hold from labview and started labview first then MFS to still no avail I'm running 8.6 with the latest set of visa drivers.  XP, Quad core 2.6  Thankyou very much for your help

[Dennis_Knutson]

You are running into a limitation of the OS. Only one application can access a port at one time. If you were to loopback com1 to com2 and use LabVIEW to read com2, it would probably work.

[xenwalker]

Which makes sense but I found a program that can just "Read" the port information no matter what program has captured the port it's called Free Serial Port Monitor http://www.serial-port-monitor.com/index.html (Granted I have to run it before I run any program I wish to monitor)  But the fact that it's doing what I want to do means there surely has to be a way that I can do this as well in labview. At least I would hope so. Thankyou for your support

[Dennis_Knutson]

I know of know way to do this with LabVIEW or any other high level application such as Hyperterminal or Procomm. I haven't used this program you pointed to but I have used portmon for years and the level that it works at, is different and able to bypass the limitation in the OS.

[Xenwalker1]

So in short Labview cannot monitor ports that are open? Maybe this is giveing labview to much credit but I'm sure it can. Labview kicks way to much ass to be stumped for somthing trival. I'm just not savvy enough to take the full potenial of labview.  So the only way to address this problem for a guy like me is to have portmon or somthing like it pump out a file then have labview read it. Then do data manipulations. Thats a downer.

Thankyou for your time.

[Dennis_Knutson]

If you are so sure that LabVIEW can open a port that another application has open, then you would be the first person to accomplish it.

For a test, open only LabVIEW on com1 and then try to open Hyperterminal on the same port. If you can get Hyperterminal to do that, you will also be the first person.

As I said earlier, the best recomendation I have is to connect your com1 to com2. If you don't have a second com port, a USB-RS232 adapter will work and they are cheap.