GR47 GSM module - serial comms

[barkerben]

Not sure if anyone here can help, but here goes... I've been using CCS for a while in various projects. I have used RS232 quite a bit, but never with full flow control. For starters the MAX232 can't deal with it, I need a much larger IC with more channels to implement full hardware flow control.

I am now working on a project with with a GR47 GSM module. This has a serial interface, but by default uses full hardware flow control. Dealing with all the pins for this seems a bit unnecessary - there won't be much comms, and I can always just buffer anything that arrives onto the PIC UART... this pins are:

RX
TX
RTS
CTS
DTR
DTS

I can set the module to use software flow control, but the default is hardware. This leaves me in a bit of a chicken/egg situation - so the question is if I short CTS/RTS can I communicate with the device and tell it to use software control instead?

I can short RTS and CTS so that the modules request to send automatically gives it permission to do so - unsure about the others though. I realise this is a bit vague - does anyone have any advice?

Cheers,

Ben