I’m hoping someone can help me troubleshoot this. I have skyconnect on a seperate machine (because HA is in hyper-v, questioning my life choices re that one now) and have set it up to forward onto the LAN as TCP. With some excellent help on the end of the thread below, i believe we have confirmed it is available, but i can’t get ZHA to talk to it.
I had some superb help from @aceindy and was hoping someone could wade in on the ZHA config side, and how i can go about investigating it.
We already established the usb stick is reachable over tcp (port is open and reachable with TelNet),
but it seams ZHA is unable to connect to it 
So is there anyone who has succesfully configured ZHA with Socat?
I have done a bit more digging on this - i thought the info might help somebody to help me… I used a different serial to tcp software that has a debug window ; HA tries to connect twice then packs in. I’ve added the drivers for the skyconnect so i’m not sure where i have a problem here?
@IanRH One of the reason I moved to VMware was because my (new) ConbeeII stick used deconz, with didn’t support SoCat.
So just fyi, the VMWare Player is free to use (for private, non-commercial use).
It’s a bit harder to set up (f.e autostart), but it is do-able
Thanks - VMWare is maybe worth a try then. I had no joy with Virtualbox, couldnt even get it off the ground.
@IanRH Since you’re running W10/11;
Just stumbled on this https://smarthomepursuits.com/how-to-run-vmware-workstation-virtual-machine-in-the-background/
I remember i had a hard time collecting all info when switching from Hyperv to VMware, so i figured it might come in handy
Thanks - i’ve had a read and that will be really helpful 
Conclusion os the story - abandoned the TCP attempts, installed VMWare, restored the backup, SkyConnect is now autodetected and will hopefully work when I come to set it up. Thanks for pointing me towards VMW!
Edit - got some issues with HACS stuff but that is for another thread - the subject of this thread at least has been solved!
