Connect your phone to the PC with an USB data cable

In order to send or receive SMS messages from your PC, you can attach your phone to the PC with a phone-to-pc data cable (Figure 1). The cable can be attached to the USB port of your computer. One advantage to using USB connections is that you can attach quite a large number of phones to the same PC with the help of USB hubs available at a low cost. One disadvantage is that you have to install a driver for your cable. Some of the drivers shipped with USB cables have errors and don't allow you to build a reliable system. If you install the driver software shipped with the USB data cable, a new "virtual" serial port will be register in your computer. The name of this serial port will be COM3 or COM4 or some higher number.

usb cable connection
Figure 1 - USB cable connection

The USB cables available for cell phones are built on a special chip called USB - Serial Bridge. This chip is located inside the cable and is powered by the USB port. When you plug your USB cable into the PC the Windows OS will detect this chip and will ask for the USB driver.

Some USB cables can use the power current available in the USB port to charge the battery of the phone. If you purchase a cable with this option you must make sure, that the charging will happen automatically and no special software is required. If you have to install a software for charging there is a high probability that the installed software will lock the serial port and you won't be able to use the cable for SMS messaging and battery charging simultaneously.

If you don't have an USB data cable available for your phone, but you can get a standard RS232 data cable, you can still use USB (Figure 2). In this case you should install an USB-Serial converter. The USB-Serial converter can be attached to the PC's USB port and the data cable can be attached to it. In this case the installation procedure will be similar to the procedure you would follow when you would install a standard USB data cable. First you attach the cable to the computer, then you install the driver for the cable. The driver will create the "virtual" com port you can use for SMS messaging.

usb serial converter
Figure 2 - USB serial converter

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