7 Days to Go

We are trying to get our household affairs under control.  For example, we have to file our tax return!!!  We are stacking gear in the garage in anticipation of departure on Thursday afternoon.  I will be making a run out today for food storage bags and chocolate bars.  Sandra is trying to get a spare pair of glasses later today. 
On the technical front.  I'm still grappling with the largely theoretical question of how to do weatherfax using the Icom M802 HF radio and my Dell (you don't really need a serial port) laptop.  I say it's theoretical because I haven't even see the radio yet. It will be waiting for us when we get to the boat at the end of next week. Information that I've found conflicts but here is the general idea: NOAA thoughtfully takes its weather charts as greyscale fax images and and encodes them into frequency modulated radio signals.  I should be able to receive these signals on the Icom and send them to my laptop to demodulate and display them.  The first and last parts should be fairly straightforward.  The challenge seems to be interfacing the radio and the computer.  One possibility is to run an audio cable from the headphone jack on the control head of the radio to the mike jack on the laptop.  While this sounds like a natural, I have generally found individuals reporting failure who try this.  A second, related option, is to use the speaker output on the radio's base unit.  I don't have much data on this approach.  Another pair of possibilities is to use one of the radio's serial ports.  One is designed for computer communication so perfect, right?  The other serial port is provided for a modem, so that sounds pretty good, too.  The primary problem with this approach is that I have no serial port on my laptop.  However, there are serial to USB interface cables.  I don't know whether audio can be transmitted via USB but since it is a "universal" serial bus, it seems like it should.  I have also seen serial to audio conversion cables, but that approach uses 3 of the 9 pins on the RS232C end and I have to be sure that the right pins are used.  Some folks make their own, but I am like Jack the Ripper with a soldering iron.  Expensive adjacent components are likely to melt into a messy slag of molten solder when I try to do anything delicate.
With all of these alternatives, there is still a great deal of uncertainty present.  The software does not easily match up with the input signal.  I am theorizing this is largely because the signal at the laptop has too much amplitude, but I don't really know.
What to do? I think I will try to obtain cables for all 3 approaches: 1) audio, 2) serial to USB, 3) serial to audio and try them all.  It's wasteful, but once we are underway, obtaining the cables gets difficult to impossible. - John