Serial Ports and Cellphones

This page configures the serial ports and cellphones that are connected to the gateway. Changing the order of the phones in this list affects the Inbound Serial Port Selection accordingly (the order that the phones are used in.)

Press Add or double-click an existing item to change its configuration.  The Serial Port Configuration dialog will appear:

Serial Port (COM):

The COM port number of the serial port (COM1, COM2, etc.)

Speed

The baud rate that is compatible with the cell phone's serial port.

Parity

Parity determines the method, if any, that SMS Gateway shall use to check the accuracy of transmitted characters. In most cases, parity checking is not required. However, parity can be odd or even, or none.   

Parity checking is used by a receiving device to detect transmission errors.  When "None" is selected, the data is not changed for checksum purposes. Selecting Even parity arranges data so that the total count of "on" bits in each data character is an even number.  This is controlled by setting the last or most significant bit (called the parity bit) to 0 or 1 as needed.  Odd parity works the same way, except that the count of 1 bits results in an odd number.

Data Bits

The number of bits transmitted to identify a character, usually 7 or 8.

Stop Bits

The number of bits sent at the end of every byte transmitted. This signals the receiving hardware to resynchronize. Most serial devices use 1 stop bit.

Flow Control

Select Hardware flow control to use RTS/CTS handshaking between the server port and the cell phone. Alternately, you may select Software flow control to send bytes using XON-XOFF signaling.

Direction:

The Direction setting affects the flow of data bytes in the cable between 2 serial ports.  Select "Both" (bi-directional) when there are 2 different flows (wires) available.

Send Timeout:

The duration in milliseconds to wait before timing out a send operation.

Receive Timeout:

The duration in milliseconds to wait before timing out a receive operation.

Phone Description:

Press the "..." button to browse for an .I3Cell configuration file, which is an XML file that describes how to communicate with that phone.  The path to that file must be specified as a UNC path that the SMS Gateway has read access to.

Active check box

Check this box to activate the serial port/phone configuration.

Press OK to save the changes to the Serial Port settings. When control returns to the Serial Ports and Cellphones tab, optionally use the Up and Down buttons to change the order of the phones in the list. This affects the order the phones will be used in (the Inbound Serial Port Selection).