(Taiwan) Contact: Glen Chiu E-mail: glenchiugoodway.com.tw Product: Plugable USB to RS-232 DB9 Serial Adapter (PL-2303HX Rev D chipset) Plugable Technologies (USA & UK Direct) Contact: Some of you may know I am an amateur “ham” radio operator, my call sign is N4IXT. Good Way Technology Co., Ltd. View online or download PDF Operation & users manual for EDISON.Ok, this post is a bit off what I normally talk about, but I wanted to add it so I’d have a spot to point people back to, and more importantly be able to refer back to it myself.Prolific recommends following vendor cable brands: Product: FB1210 USB to 1-port RS-232 Adapter. FTDI chip is a Windows/Mac registered device, that means it is Plug and Play(PnP) and function immediately after plug in without driver installation process.Edison Scratch 2500 Dual CD/USB/MP3 DJ MixerIncludes:Power CordHardshell CaseGood mixer. This cable has a built in FTDI chip and it works with all Windows/Mac/Linux OS versions including the latest Windows 10 and Mac OS X 10.12(Sierra).Another popular maker along these lines is Wouxun.prolific usb to serialcomm port. One of the most prolific manufacturers is a Chinese company who makes very inexpensive (some might even say cheap) radios marketed under the names of Baofeng and BTech. There are a variety of hand held radios on the market.Now if you were like me, and installed CHIRP, plugged in the cable, and hooked it to your radio, you probably got a lot of error messages.Inside the programming cable are some chips that help the computer talk to the radio. Sometimes the cable comes with the radio, other times you’ll need to purchase it separately. It has versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux, although for this article we are going to focus on Windows.You’ll also need the cable for your model of radio. The software most people use is called CHIRP, available from. Installing Software and DriversThe first thing you’ll need is the programming software itself.
Prolific (Clone) Usb Cable Ation For A Windows 10 And Mac(If you are on an older version of Windows you can open up Device Manager through the Administration panel).Scroll down the list to the Ports area and you’ll see the Prolific driver listed. On Windows 10 just go to the Cortona search area (next to the Start menu) and type in Device Manager. Which is where the problems start.Prolific was naturally a tad upset that someone had stolen their design, and who can blame them? So they started adding a special code to their newer chips, as well as an update to the drives so that if the chip isn’t an authentic chip from Prolific, the driver won’t work.You can verify this for yourself. These Chinese companies cloned the chips and their code, indeed the cables even report to Windows that they are from Prolific.Thus when you plug in the cable, it tells Windows “Hey I’m a Prolific cable”, and Windows goes out and downloads and installs the latest Prolific drives. Fortunately someone has made that very easy to do.Head over to iFamilySoftware at and they have a detailed article describing the issue (which I’ve just briefly recapped here). The solution then is to install the most recent version that works. While rather cryptic, what this really translates into is “Hey, we’re trying to use the Prolific driver, but it’s telling us this isn’t a Prolific device.”This puts us in a bind, as we need to use the driver, but the latest version doesn’t work. ![]() If you aren’t sure of the COM port, go back to Device Manager using the previous instructions, and expand the Ports. This let’s CHIRP get a correct image of the radio type and what its current settings are.Click on the Radio in the menus, then from the dropdown pick Radio, Download From Radio.Next it wants to know what COM port the cable is using, who made the radio, and what model. Your first step will be to download what is currently in the radio, even if it’s a brand new radio with just the default handful of frequencies. Open up CHIRP, then plug in your cable, and (with the radio off) plug it into your radio, and then turn the radio on.CHIRP opens up with a big blank screen. The radio I’m plugging in here is a Baofeng.Once you pick the vendor, the Model drop down will now be populated with a list of all the models CHIRP supports for that Vendor. Again you can use device manager, like I did, to determine what the correct COM port is for your computer, and if you use multiple computers your COM port may be different on each.So once you’ve entered the correct COM port, you’ll see a drop down list for the Vendor, and CHIRP supports a LOT of radio companies. On the computer I took the above screen shot on, the computer where I have it working, Prolific is using COM3. If you look back to the original image from the Device Manager you’ll note it read COM4 at the end. I’m using two computers to write this article, one in which the Prolific drivers didn’t work, the second where it did. I’ve personally programmed dozens of radios with CHIRP for myself and others, so you can safely click YES. Don’t worry about it, CHIRP has been used on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of these radios. Once done just click OK.Basically it’s CHIRP’s way of saying “Use at your own risk”. My radio is actually a UV-5RA, but the UV-5R settings work for it too. ![]() This lets me track changes over time, or go back to an older version if I need to.Now you are ready to start entering frequencies. If I later go update it, I’ll do a Save As, and update the date. After that I put the date I created the file. In this example it’s for Shelby County AL. I generally use the radio vendor, then model, then the area where the frequencies are for. Skype for mac latest version wont workJust be sure your cursor is sitting on empty row in the frequency list or else you may overwrite some of your existing frequencies.The final option is to copy from an IMG file a friend with a similar radio has sent you. There is a list of multiple sites you can import from, each will let you search on a variety of things like your state, county, or zip code to find frequencies near you. In the Radio menu is an option “Import from data source”. Radio Reference ( ) is a good site to look things up, but there are many you can pick from.Even easier though is to use CHIRPs built in functionality. You could also look up the frequencies online and cut/paste into CHIRP. If you look to the very left, there are two tabs. You can copy just some of the rows or their entire frequency list.Now that you have your frequencies loaded you’re almost, but not quite, ready to upload to the radio. You can just open their file and copy/paste into yours. Do note these are for the Baofeng, what you see on the Settings tab will change with each radio type.On the Basic settings you’ll see Display Mode A and B. However there are a few you may wish to look at. Now click on the Settings tab.The overwhelming majority of settings you should leave alone unless you have a specific need. But more on uploading in a moment.The other thing on for this radio you might want to look at is the background color for the display, this Baofeng can have three different background colors, and you can set the Standby, Receive (RX) and Transmit (TX) colors independently. You can make a change, upload, then if you don’t like it make another change and just upload again. Note that you don’t have to import from the radio before you upload back to the radio every time. I don’t find Channel very useful, but feel free to experiment and pick what you like.As you will see it’s not big deal to make a change and re-upload to the radio. I tend to prefer Name as it shows the name (such as the repeater call sign), but you could alternately show the frequency of the repeater. Your choices are Name, Frequency, and Channel.
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