[chirp_users] HELP!

[Jim Unroe]

On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 10:21 PM Jim Unroe <rock.unroe at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 9:58 PM Ted Smith <info at pikespeakparagliding.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > Hi,
> > You guys probably get this all the time, but now it’s my turn.
> > I have been using CHIRP with my Baofeng radios for the past couple of years with no problem.
> > I recently had to upgrade my Mac OS to 10.11. Now I can’t get CHIRP to talk to my radios.
> > I assume it is because the drivers are wrong or something. I have tried downloading the Prolific drivers. No luck so far.
> > There used to be a pl2303 option on the drop down menu when I was uploading/ downloading. It isn’t there anymore.
> > I’m not sure what to do at this point.
> > Please help, I’m begging.
> > Thanks,
> > -Ted
>
> Hi Ted,
>
> My son-in-law gave me a MacBook Air a couple of months ago. I'm not a
> Mac user so I decided that my first project would be to see if I could
> get CHIRP running on it.
>
> Most of my programming cables were furnished with the radios so
> virtually every one of the freebies has a counterfeit USB-to-TTL chip
> in it. So I knew up front that using device driver from the Prolific
> website was out of the question. I also have a homebrew programming
> cable that has a Silicon Labs chip and a few programming cables with
> FTDI chips.
>
> So what I did was to purchase and install a 3rd party device driver
> from Repleo. It works for programming cables with Prolific PL2303
> chips, WCH CH341 chips and Silicon Labs CP2102 chips. They want 7.90
> euros for it which at the time I bought it came to $9.11 USD.
>
> https://www.mac-usb-serial.com/
>
> I used the native Apple driver for my programming cables with FTDI chips.
>
> Jim KC9HI

As with with Prolific drivers for Windows, the Prolific company
intentionally crippled their device driver so it won't work when
paired with a counterfeit Prolific USB-to-TTL chip. Genuine Prolific
chips in programming cables are rare. Out of the 20+ programming
cables I have that are detected as having a Prolific chip, only 1 is
genuine. It cost $25 because the vendor specifically went out of his
way to source these programming cables with genuine Prolific chips.

Like Windows users still can, Mac users can no longer use the old
generic drivers that are shown on the MacOS Tips page (which used to
be the workaround Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks) because they are
not signed. You either have to spend $9.11 and get the signed,
3rd-party device driver (which provides functionality with programming
cables having PL2302 (Prolific), CH341 and CP2102 chips) or put the
$9.11 toward an FTDI chip based programming cable that allows you to
use the native Apple driver.

Jim KC9HI