Looking for advice on virtual serial port emulators

[RonDavic]

Hi!
I’m trying to set up a virtual serial port and would appreciate some advice on which tool works best. I need it mainly for testing. I’ve already tried one option, but its capabilities felt pretty limited.
Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Lorsen]

For testing, I’ve had pretty good luck with Virtual COM Port Driver: create virtual COM ports in a system I’ve used it on Windows in a few setups, and it’s been stable and easy to work with. It handles basic virtual COM port pairs as well as more advanced setups, which makes it more useful than some simpler tools.
It’s a paid option, but if you need something reliable and a bit more flexible, it’s worth a look.

 

[louie1961]

I use a software product called com0com for my ham radio setup. Null-modem emulator (com0com) - virtual serial port driver for Windows

I use it in windows 11 to set up my SDR, and to do radio control, etc. On my hardware, it uses the The CP210x USB to UART bridge to interface with the radio

 

[Greg_E]

Do you need this so to go between apps on the same computer, or to go over ethernet to other computers?

I've used this to send serial from one computer to another Serial over Ethernet - Software Serial to Ethernet Connector worked really well and fairly cheap.

You can also split the port on the receive end, COM Port Multiple Sharing with Serial to Ethernet Connector

This was all set up for getting song data out of a radio station playback, and into the audio encoders to embed for streams, we used 2 encoders (AAC+ and MP3), both encoders lived in the same PC. So PC to virtual comm port to ethernet and ethernet to virtual comm port that was also split (information was always one way in this system).