Sometimes your emulation display will have extraneous characters mixed in with readable text. You might also see a situation where none of the characters are readable.

When you connect using a modem or direct serial cable, but none of the characters are readable, this always means the communication settings are off. Check for the correct baud rate, word length, parity and stop bits, based on the host port configuration. Change the settings in TERM or TinyTERM to match.

If all the settings match, then there is an incompatibility between the two modems. If possible, update the drivers for both. Otherwise, one or both will need to be replaced.

If the login prompt comes up correctly, but not everything is readable after you log in, this means the terminal emulation type is set wrong. Usually there will be extra nonsense characters between the correct ones. You may also have alignment problems with text.

Check your .profile or equivalent on the host for the correct terminal type. If it’s not there, check the host application’s documentation for the correct emulation. Once that’s set properly, the display will be correct.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Modem, Serial (RS232), Terminal Emulation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.