[chirp_users] baofeng cable

[Tom TA]

Greetings All,

     I wish to thank all those that have been contributing to this 
thread - I have found it quite helpful!

     I happen to own two programming cables, one from Baofeng with the 
Prolific counterfeit chip and one after market cable with a genuine 
Prolific chip.

     I have computers running both Windows 10 and Linux Mint 17 with a 
Chirp installation on both.

     At the onset I found the Baofeng cable would run OK under Linux but 
not under Win 10. My low cost after market cable with the genuine 
Prolific chip worked with both computers.

     Under Windows 10 I tested the cable by watching Device Manager for 
the Prolific port error, which was always error 10.

     Using Device Manager I found the Win 10 driver to be recent version 
3.6.787.35x.

     I found I needed to take the following steps to get the Baofeng 
cable to work under Windows 10:

     1 - Using Device Manager I uninstalled the 3.6.787.x driver and did 
the recommended 3.2.0.0 install.

     2 - I re-tested and discovered the Baofeng cable still did not work 
with the same error message reported in Device Manager.

     3 - I found the driver version being used was still the recent 
3.6.787.35x driver which I presumed must have automatically re-loaded 
from the Internet.

     4 - I disabled the Internet and again uninstalled the driver.

     5 - I re-tested and discovered the Baofeng cable still did not work 
with the same error message reported in Device Manager and found that it 
was now using a slightly older 3.6.x.x driver which I subsequently 
uninstalled.

     6 - I repeated the step 5 test and uninstall procedure several 
times whilst noting the driver version was becoming older and older.

     7 - Finally I got down to version 3.2.0.0 and found the Baofeng 
cable now worked.

     8 - I re-enabled the Internet and did another test and found it 
still worked.

     I presume I had a stack of older Prolific drivers stored on disk 
which remained after routine updates during the previous years of 
running Windows 7. Apparently the upgrade to Windows 10 did not delete 
the older drivers (which is probably wise). It appears Windows 10 
selects and loads the most recent driver as it took several cycles of 
deleting before I got down to 3.2.0.0. I noticed once I got there the 
Roll Back button became greyed out which I guess indicates there are no 
drivers older than 3.2.0.0 stored on my computer.

     The moral of the story is to check the version number of the driver 
under Device Manager>Prolific Port>Properties>Driver and make sure your 
using version 3.2.0.0 and if not do what ever is necessary to get there.

     And there is more to this story - when I re-started my computer it 
reverted the driver back to version  3.6.787.357. I found I had to go to 
Device Manager and roll back the driver to get back to 3.2.0.0. After 
doing that once it seemed to stick as it re-loaded 3.2.0.0 the next time 
I re-started. It remains to be seen how long it will stick. Unless the 
driver update is blocked by a roll back flag it may again become updated 
with Windows Update in the future. If so I will need to roll back to 
3.2.0.0 again, which I now find is quite easy to do now that I know how.

     I hope this information is helpful! The driver update and selection 
features of Windows 10 may be adding confusion to this Baofeng cable, 
counterfeit Prolific chip driver issue.

73
Tom
VA7TA

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