I dug out my Soekris 4801 and needed to hookup a serial connection to figure out what the was actually running and to reconfigure as required.

After digging through my cables I found a DB-9 serial female to female cable and hooked it up, only to frustratingly find that the cable wasn’t infact a null modem cable, and actually a somewhat obscure female-to-female DCE-to-DTE.

Then I realized, that I don’t need to buy yet-another-cable to have to carry around, instead my USB-to-serial adapter already features a long cable – so just attach an adapter and solved!

As long as the adapter allows you to unscrew the screw thread sockets, you can then fit it directly between the serial device and the USB-to-serial adapter. :-)

The 80s called, it wants it's communications method back!