How to know whether a Bluetooth dongle supports the Serial Port Profile (SPP) in WinXP SP3?

bluetooth spp
user1129812 picture user1129812 · May 27, 2012 · Viewed 11.2k times · Source

I am using a USB Bluetooth dongle in a WinXP SP3 environment. I assume that the Bluetooth dongle is recognized by the default Bluetooth Stack (The Bluetooth icon appears in the bottom right corner).

I want to know that how could I list the services supported by the Bluetooth dongle (or by the WinXP Bluetooth Stack) ? How could I know whether the Serial Port Profile (SPP) is supported or not ?

Moreover, as I am not very familiar with the Bluetooth protocol, I want to know that is the SPP service a feature supported by the WinXP Bluetooth Stack ? or a feature supported by the firmware in the Bluetooth dongle ? (i.e. with the same Bluetooth dongle, this SPP service may appear when I am using a certain Bluetooth Stack and may disappear when I am using another Bluetooth Stack.)

Thanks for any pointer or suggestion.

Answer

alanjmcf picture alanjmcf · May 27, 2012

Think about Bluetooth dongle vs stack like the internet case. The Bluetooth dongle is the Ethernet card and the Bluetooth stack is everything above that as implemented by Windows, e.g. support for TCP/IP, and then for various applications' support for various internet protocols/applications.

So SPP support is handled by the stack, and not the dongle -- the dongle just deals with sending packets etc etc.

SPP can be accessed both via an API and via a virtual COM Port on most Bluetooth stacks. The MSFT stack certainly supports both. See the "COM Ports" tab on the "Bluetooth Settings" Control Panel. If pairing the device doesn't set-up a COM port automatically then you can do manually it there.

"COM Ports" tab on the "Bluetooth Settings" dialog
(source: alanjmcf.me.uk)

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