Hi Dan,
The virtual serial port mechanism is pretty raw. The client side can just pretend it is a serial port, and in most cases work without any modification. For linux, we use a true pseudo-terminal (“pty”) device. On Windows, that can’t be done without a signed driver (I think), so we use a similar mechanism that seems to be used a lot these days. It’s all covered on this page of our manual:
https://wfview.org/wfview-user-manual/sharing-control/
Usually the big hurdle on the user end is to get the client program to allow the user to freely type in a somewhat unusual serial port name like “/home/elliott/radio-pty” or whatever the user specifies. It looks like the version of CHIRP I have installed here locally allows the user to freely type over the combo selection, so that part is done!
Since CI-V is a multi-point bus protocol, we are able to filter out “packets” of radio information so that other programs won’t see wfview traffic - assuming that the other programs don’t have a hard-coded “from” address of 0xE1, which is what wfview defaults to. Currently we filter out anything that is intended to go to wfview, and we also can filter out “transceive” packets that the radios fire off to everyone, such as the user rotating the dial.
In other words, it might just work as it is. I’ll update my local copy of CHIRP and see if there are profiles for the 7300, 718, or 9700 – those are the rigs I can easily get to and try it.
–E
de W6EL