[Xastir] bluetooth serial port issues

[Jason KG4WSV]

I'm trying to do some cable reduction on my xastir mobile rig, and I
bought a bluetooth/rs232 dongle (
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/412767-REG/Iogear_GBS301_Serial_Adapter_with_Bluetooth.html
) to play with. If conditions are perfect, it works fine.  Since
Murphy rides shotgun on balloon chases, though, I decided a little
testing under sub-optimal conditions was in order.

rig is xastir 1.8.3, mac os X 10.4.latest on a PPC laptop, Garmin MAP60C.

For the first test, I wondered what would happen if the dongle lost
power.  The answer:  Bad Things.  xastir locked up. hard. as in, kill
-9 wouldn't kill it.  Yep, managed to create a situation that required
a reboot to clean up, and that doesn't happen often on my macs.

So, the xastir related question: is this a problem with serial port
error handling?  I've had less than pleasant experiences when a
USB/232 adapter lost connectivity, but this was much worse.  Is it
even possible to detect/recover from this condition?  I've brought up
the subject of retries on serial ports (feature request 1715100), but
this probably goes beyond that.

ideas? clues? suggestions?

-Jason
kg4wsv