To perform the capture, we must start the capture program, then start the communications interaction and wait for it to finish, then stop the capture, and finally post-process the captured data.

If you have two or more devices from the same vendor, you must modify the start_trace.sh script to pick the correct one in some other way.

If you only have one cable, you may choose to modify the start_trace.sh script to replace the commandline param ($1) with the vendor ID.Download and copy the two script files and the 'tidy.c' program (links at the end of this page) into your directory.

Set up an empty directory for your capture work.Use the application to program your radio, to verify that everything works.Run the application under Wine and configure it to use the correct 'Windows' COM port as supplied by Wine.Determine the Linux name of the serial cable USB device (e.g., /dev/ttyUSB0) Wine makes the Linux serial ports available as COM ports.Manufacturer's radio programming application.Finally, a small post-processing application can extract the actual serial data and present it in an easily-usable fashion. The Wireshark application (and the batch-mode Tshark application) run under linux and interact with usbmon and actually capture the data. Linux has a facility called usbmon that permits capture of the USB protocol as the program reads and writes the serial port. Wine permits the application to use the USB cable connected to Linux. Wine and tshark/wireshark are part of most major Linux distributions and can be built for most others(Wine requires an Intel-compatible system.) We will use the Wine suite in Linux to provide a Windows API environment, and then run the manufacturer's software under Wine.

There are ways to do this inside the Windows OS, but you may prefer to use a Linux system. We avoid this by intercepting the communications inside of the OS. Simple methods such as interposing a sniffer system may work, but some protocols have timing constraints that cause these methods to fail. To write a driver, we need to first analyze the radio's serial communications protocol.

Use a small program to post-process the data into an easily-read form.

Use Tshark (or Wireshark) to filter the captured data.

use Wireshark (preferrably the Tshark variant) to capture the USB protocol interactions.

Run the Windows program to be sniffed under Wine.

Wireshark usb sniffer