With some persistance, and good old trial and error I found the answer.

Ron @ AMT was helpful in getting me to be sure that I had done all the steps correctly. Seems that it came back to the laptop as being the last thing that was not communicating. Although Windows said the COM1 port was working, and there were no conflicts, I still had no communication. Checked with some of the office computer geeks, and it stumped them for a while. One guy finally said that he found that his Palm Pilot did some wierd stuff to the com ports.

The light finally went on!

I had tried to load up my Palm software on the home laptop to make it synch with the infrared port, but it still captured the COM port and woul dnot let go.

Went in to the Control Panel/System/Device Manager and disabled the IR ports, deleted COM2 which was not used by anything and cleared out all the PALM software and Hotsynch icon in the lower right of the taskbar.

Suddenly we have communication. This software is really neat. I can see just how long a run I have and the total engine run time. This loks like it will be real helpful in diagnosing Kevin's low RPM issue. We will see if he gets full throttel in the air, or if the battery is getting too low.

Thanks for the help, hope this description will help others.

PS, You getting the winter cruise below the equator? Hope to see you at Superman.

Steve Flaten