logging interaction between minicom and modem

[alice@cascoind.com]

Is there a way to log the interaction between minicom and modem 
similar to what chat sends to ppp.log and syslog? 

Ever since I upgraded to potato last weekend chat hasn't gotten along 
with my modem (external 57600 USR sportster) 

when I look in ppp.log or syslog I see things about chat sending it a 
AT or ATZ and expecting an OK and instead getting an alarm.

if I use minicom I can dial in fine, and run pppd after quitting minicom 
without resetting the modem, but I'd rather not use this as a long-term 
solution, so I was wondering if there was some way I could see if 
minicom is sending different commands to the modem than chat is to 
see if I need to be using different commands (or it could be that 
minicom dials when one tells it to dial whether the modem sent an OK 
after initialization or not) 

other odd things.... the first couple of days after I upgraded I was able 
to connect using ppp-calling-chat if I removed the ppp package and 
re-added it.... this is odd and moreso because that hasn't worked 
other than those first two times

I've tried removing the potato version of the ppp package and 
reinstalling the old version of ppp that I was using under slink but that 
doesn't seem to help

(oh, my kernel is 2.2.9. Occasionally I've gotten complaints about my 
module dependency file being newer than my module configuration file 
during this whole process... at some point while in the 'try anything' 
stage I recompiled my kernel, and changed ppp from being in kernel 
to being a module.... it didn't seem to make any difference but one 
never knows what difference it might have made that I'm not seeing)

please let me know if there's any other information I could provide 
that would shed light on this. Again, I'm hoping that if there's some 
way to see what minicom is telling the modem the same way I can 
with chat then maybe I can get chat to say those things instead.

-Alice (yes, we have some potato.... we have some potato today...)