Looking for help with W10 as a guest OS in VirtualBox running on OS X (El Cap) on a MBP. Except for El Cap, everything is current version.
I have a BCD436HP. Sentinel can see the uSD card through the virtualization just fine. As soon as I plug in the radio, I select Mass Storage on the radio, and I select the BEARCAT item in the USB menu in VBox; then it shows up in the guest OS right away. Gotta be quick before OS X mounts it as a disk else OS X gripes when you "remove the disk without ejecting" (which is what happens if OS X mounts the volume before you have a chance to tell VBox to grab the device) but works just fine.
With ProScan, I'm running into issues. When the radio is in Mass Storage mode, ProScan can read/write to the uSD just fine (with the same caveats as above). No problems. In Serial Port mode, though, things are not working. Only once have I managed to make serial port connectivity work.
That magic recipe was to go into VBox and set the serial port like this: Settings -> Ports -> Serial Ports -> Enable Serial Port Checked (which it was) -> Port Mode: "Host Device"; Connect to existing pipe/socket Checked; Path Address: /dev/cu.usbmodem1421. Turns out that "1421" is the right USB port on my MBP and if I'd used the left it would be /dev/cu.usbmodem1420. (YMMV on different hardware but if you do ls -lrt in /dev, it's pretty easy to see what the correct device is on your HW.)
Two issues with that. 1) VBox expects that device to be there when it boots the guest OS. If it's not, it won't boot. 2) Even when the device was there, and W10 booted, ProScan couldn't see it.
I should say "couldn't do anything with it". When I clicked autodetect, COM3 showed up as "Available" (no ID of radio or baud rate). Setting the software to use that just resulted in ProScan just cycling the port on and off without getting anywhere (you can see the status in the lower right of the ProScan screen).
If I pull all those changes out and just let the W10 guest try to see the USB device "passed through" (as it were), I get the same response from ProScan - "Available", no ID, no baud rate, and port cycling.
Interestingly, this is true whether or not I use the Uniden serial port drivers.
So I'm hoping that someone else that plays with W10 in a VBox, preferably on OS X, has solved this issue. I was pretty certain that this was a VBox issue and not a ProScan issue but I'm not as sure of that as I was. What I really need is a way to test serial port functionality in this environment with another program ... Freescan works fine to connect to my BCD996XT, so that may be a partial answer, but Freescan (which appears dead as a project, sadly) doesn't talk to 'HP scanners.
What other program could I use to connect to my BCD436HP's USB-fake-serial-port from within this environment?
I have a BCD436HP. Sentinel can see the uSD card through the virtualization just fine. As soon as I plug in the radio, I select Mass Storage on the radio, and I select the BEARCAT item in the USB menu in VBox; then it shows up in the guest OS right away. Gotta be quick before OS X mounts it as a disk else OS X gripes when you "remove the disk without ejecting" (which is what happens if OS X mounts the volume before you have a chance to tell VBox to grab the device) but works just fine.
With ProScan, I'm running into issues. When the radio is in Mass Storage mode, ProScan can read/write to the uSD just fine (with the same caveats as above). No problems. In Serial Port mode, though, things are not working. Only once have I managed to make serial port connectivity work.
That magic recipe was to go into VBox and set the serial port like this: Settings -> Ports -> Serial Ports -> Enable Serial Port Checked (which it was) -> Port Mode: "Host Device"; Connect to existing pipe/socket Checked; Path Address: /dev/cu.usbmodem1421. Turns out that "1421" is the right USB port on my MBP and if I'd used the left it would be /dev/cu.usbmodem1420. (YMMV on different hardware but if you do ls -lrt in /dev, it's pretty easy to see what the correct device is on your HW.)
Two issues with that. 1) VBox expects that device to be there when it boots the guest OS. If it's not, it won't boot. 2) Even when the device was there, and W10 booted, ProScan couldn't see it.
I should say "couldn't do anything with it". When I clicked autodetect, COM3 showed up as "Available" (no ID of radio or baud rate). Setting the software to use that just resulted in ProScan just cycling the port on and off without getting anywhere (you can see the status in the lower right of the ProScan screen).
If I pull all those changes out and just let the W10 guest try to see the USB device "passed through" (as it were), I get the same response from ProScan - "Available", no ID, no baud rate, and port cycling.
Interestingly, this is true whether or not I use the Uniden serial port drivers.
So I'm hoping that someone else that plays with W10 in a VBox, preferably on OS X, has solved this issue. I was pretty certain that this was a VBox issue and not a ProScan issue but I'm not as sure of that as I was. What I really need is a way to test serial port functionality in this environment with another program ... Freescan works fine to connect to my BCD996XT, so that may be a partial answer, but Freescan (which appears dead as a project, sadly) doesn't talk to 'HP scanners.
What other program could I use to connect to my BCD436HP's USB-fake-serial-port from within this environment?
