Express Card
nice gizmo

I finally found a use for the Express Card slot in my MacBook Pro. I now have a serial port. I tried the dongle-type USB to serial converters -- blow that off. They worked fairly well for reading the programs of two-way radio equipment, but writing to the radio was a waste of time. Maybe one out of five tries would actually work. But this new thing has access to some non-wimpy voltages by way of the card slot, and I have tried it on several different models of radio with no problems.

It might be inferred that I am running Windows when I do this sort of thing. Guilty as charged. If the radio manufacturers would desist in their misguided efforts to protect intellectual property -- software, when they are hardware makers and the software is just supposed to support their product -- it would be feasible for someone to write a one-size-fits-all application, maybe even a Mac app, that would allow you (or me) to put in one @#$%&* program and dump it into all of the radios we have in our organization regardless of make and model.