[chirp_users] Got Two More Friends Up and Running with CHIRP

[Jim Unroe]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 10:51 AM Pat Anderson <anderson5420 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> My friends just got new Baofeng UV-5Rs. Steve is a Windows 10 guy and Don is a MacBook Pro guy running Mojave. They both managed to get the program installed on their respective computers and get their radios programmed. Steve bought the FTDI cable from Baofeng Tech and Windows 10 automatically installed the drivers when he plugged the cable in. No more trying to fool Windows into thinking an out-of-date driver is OK, because the genuine cable was barely more expensive than the counterfeit cables! I spent about an hour with them running over CHIRP basics, especially that you HAVE to download an image from the radio you want to program, edit it, save it, and then upload it back to the same radio from which it was downloaded. Don got his Mac going after I left, so I don't know if he in fact downloaded the Mac driver from mac-usb-serial.com I suggested or if Mojave likewise automatically installed drivers, as he had the authentic FTDI cable as well. I have a counterfeit Prolific, which works great on my Chromebook with Ubuntu, but I needed the purchased driver to get a serial port on my ancient MacBook Pro with High Sierra (it is too old and lame to run Mohave, so it limps along with High Sierra and a lot of spinning beach balls!). Anyway, two more fans in the CHIRP world!

I don't think anyone would want to use the mac-usb-serial.com driver
with an FTDI chip based programming cable. It is for PL-2303, CH341
and CP2102 type USB-to-TTL chips.

The driver from from the FTDI chip vendor's website, ftdichip.com, is
shown to work with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or later. But I've seen users
of recent Mac OS X versions recommend using the native Apple FTDI
driver over the one from Future Technology Devices International.

Jim KC9HI