socat experts?

[josh at offthehill.org (Josh ChaitinPollak)]

Hi,

Is anyone on the list a socat expert, or alternatively have any  
knowledge of serial to ethernet transport applications?

I'm trying to use socat to forward serial traffic to a UDP port like  
this:

socat /dev/tts/0,nonblock,raw,echo=0,b115200 UDP4:10.5.5.2:5000

This should forward traffic on that serial port to port 5000 of IP  
address 10.5.5.2, and it works fine IF there is an application  
listening on 10.5.5.2. But if nothing is listening on that port,  
socat terminates. Is there a way to get socat to keep trying, and  
never say connection refused? Given the nature of UDP communications,  
its ok if we lose packets, but I want socat to keep trying with new  
packets.

Alternatively, does anyone know of another application that can  
forward serial communication to an ethernet connection over udp?

Thanks,

Josh