RS232 &Current loop? crap (NOT FPUIB)

[Description of ratehr intersting instrument] Hmmm... It seems to me that this is a low-level analyser, looking at distortion (unequal lengths of marks/spaces) and things like that. It doesn't seem to be able to grab the data as characters and display them later. Somewhere I ahve a battery-powered breakout box that will do some of waht that can do, inclduing send test messages, display distortion, etc. My Trend 1/4 is probanly a better distordion meter. Bot of those are RS232 only, yours seems to do current loop too. Then there's my TDMS5, a wonder valved (but jsut about portable) device to send test signals with controlable distortion and display it distortion of the incoming signal. At a higher level (character rather than signals), I use a 'Black Box' unit I was given recently. It's a Z180-absed thing with a Z8530 serial chip. YEs, it handles synchronous as well as async data, EBCDIC as well as SCII (and baudot, but for some insane reason the slwoest baud rate is 75 :-(). If that;s not enough, I have a Ferret. That thing is portable (attache-case style) and incorporates a breakout box, RS232, curent loop and paralell interfaces, a hex keypad, a strip printer, a cassette interface (!) and an EPROM programemr (!!). You can do all sort of things with that, includign RS232 to current lop conversion with different abud rates o ntejh 2 interfces, capture an print data on a serial line, send test messages, program EPROMs. writye and run Z80 programs, etc, etc, etc. -tony