want to talk to serial modem
 

I've just installed RH9, I have also installed a PCMCIA gprs card (option globetrotter), linux has recognised it and set it up on ttyS18.

I DO NOT wish to use the card to dial out, or allow someone to dial in.

I very simply wish to send it a few AT commands, specifically I want to retrieve an SMS message from the SIM, this can be done with AT commands.

I think this must be very simple, however every how-to I look at seems to assume you want to use the modem to dial out / in (funny that). I'm seeing applications out there like smsd and mgetty - but surely I don't need an application to do this??

You can do this without an application by echoing commands to the modem's serial port (ttyS18) while running get the results back.

But I recommend using minicom, an application specifically designed to talk to serial modems at the AT command level. At the least, you can use this to interactively test a sequence of AT commands to see if what you get is the expected result or not, before scripting them.

Chat is another program that might be useful to you; it lets you set up a “conversation” with your modem, telling it which AT commands to give, what results to expect, and what action to take when it gets a wrong result. It will also let you hand over the SMS message to another program, eg. to save it to a file or email it to you.

minicom / serial modem
 

That really helped, I realised my Globetrotter was not correctly configured, this link helped http://www.pharscape.org/index.php?o...9#_Toc83808113

I'm looking for something like minicom, but without the terminal emulation - ie so I can directly talk to the modem. If I start minicom as a sub process and write and read to that I get loads of terminal control characters

I've tried directly eg. echo "AT" > /dev/modem but that doesn't do anything ... any ideas?

Something you might try (that I've just come across) is xwisp.py. (sf.net/projects/xwisp)

It's intended for programming PIC microcontrollers, but it has a term command that claims to give you a direct interface to the serial port. In theory, this might let you talk to the modem without AT commands.

You might also try using wisp.exe under wine or freedos; it definitely won't produce ANSI escape commands