Thanks all for your good responses. The short term end result is that
I have not found a solution that works easily. I have USB only ports
on my PC and am sitting in South Caicos in the midst of a passage from
the VI to FL. I am going to get underway this morning. I thought
that I had the virtualplex debugged and working, but on bringing the
PC out of hibernation when I left the fuel dock yesterday, the Cap'n
would not find GPS and I decided to uninstall the virtualplex demo so
that I would have stable GPS sig to my Nav program. This serial to
usb business has been a PITA til I got an edgeport 2 serial to USB
which has been flawless. Later, Larry