Appendix B.    Serial Port Pinouts 
 
 
 Standard Null-Modem Cable Pin Out 
Female 
DB9 
Socket 
 
Female 
DB9 
Socket 
1 & 6  —————  4 
2  —————  3 
3  —————  2 
4  —————  1 & 6 
5  —————  5 
7  —————  8 
8  —————  7 
9 
most null modems have 
no connection
1
 
9 
1
 If the null-modem cable does not connect pin 9 to pin 9, configure the 
modem to output RING (or other characters previous to the DTR being 
asserted) on the modem TX line to wake the CR800 and activate the DTR line 
or enable the modem. 
 
 
B.2.2  Power States 
The RS-232 port is powered under the following conditions: 1) when the setting 
RS232Power is set or 2) when the SerialOpen() for COMRS232 is used in the 
program. These conditions leave RS-232 on with no timeout. If SerialClose() is 
used after SerialOpen(), the port is powered down and left in a sleep mode 
waiting for characters to come in. 
Under normal operation, the port is powered down waiting for input. Upon 
receiving input there is a 40 second software timeout before shutting down. The 
40 second timeout is generally circumvented when communicating with 
datalogger support software
 (p. 86) because it sends information as part of the 
protocol that lets the CR800 know it can shut down the port. 
When in sleep mode, hardware is configured to detect activity and wake up. Sleep 
mode has the penalty of losing the first character of the incoming data stream. 
PakBus takes this into consideration in the "ring packets" that are preceded with 
extra sync bytes at the start of the packet. SerialOpen() leaves the interface 
powered-up, so no incoming bytes are lost. 
When the logger has data to send via RS-232, if the data are not a response to a 
received packet, such as sending a beacon, then it will power up the interface, 
send the data, and return to sleep mode with no 40 second timeout.