[Ham-Mac] Chirp
T. Joseph Carter
kf7qzc at spiritsubstance.com
Tue Mar 11 22:28:15 EDT 2014
Your BEST bet with the Chinese radios is to stop using Prolific
cables. My Wouxun cable, for example, doesn't work using any
Prolific driver I've tried on the Mac. It works okay using Linux and
Windows using the right driver, but I've never gotten it to work on
the Mac.
You might have luck with this driver:
http://www.miklor.com/COM/UV_Drivers.php#mac
If you want a cable with a known quantity chip with known working Mac
drivers, you've got two options, both of which are going to require
some very basic soldering.
Te first is the CP2102 breakout. These can be had for < $3 on eBay
(just search for CP2102) and grab something like this listing:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/170946368201
If you find yourself unable to solder those pins (if you have any
experience with an iron at all, you ought to be fine, and it's a $3
part if you screw it up), this listing comes with the ribbon cable
jumper to solder wire to wire—you should be able to manage that
blindfolded. Ask me how I know… :)
Option #2 is the FTDI breakout used for popular Arduino and clone
devices. They're a little more expensive in the $6-15 range and have
a little more variance in what you'll receive. Pin header, socket
header, solder pad, or some combination of all three… May have
jumpers or not, may require a USB cable or include one. No eBay
listings here because there's just so many. Search FTDI and you'll
find lots.
A word about these things… Both CP2102 and FTDI chips come in 3.3v
or 5v models. The UV-3R is specified on Miklor as being 3.3v,
whereas the UV-5R, Wouxun, and various other Kenwood-compatible
devices are not specified. This is because Kenwood-compatibles use
5v and will still work with 3.3v signals. I wouldn't guarantee the
converse is true for the UV-3R. Make sure you get a 3.3v part for
the UV-3R.
The second thing you're going to need is a TRRS connector. You can
actually buy these, but they're not fun to solder, and IMO you're
just better off getting one of these:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/291091228870
You'll want to test continuity on that cable because I've seen each
of the following arrangements (from tip to sleeve):
Left (white), Right (red), Ground, Composite (yellow)
Left (white), Composite (yellow), Ground, Right (red)
Left (white), Right (red), Composite (yellow), Ground
Composite (yellow), Left (white), Right (red), Ground
It'd be ideal if the TRRS cable was one of the latter two, but it's
almost certainly either the second one (Canon standard) or the first
(Sony standard, but also used by some Canons).
If you want to 100% know the pinout of the cable without checking
continuity and to have ground be on the shield, you want the (more
expensive) Headset Buddy:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/371010579456
I personally wouldn't waste the Headset Buddy or its more common mate
which connects iPhone headsets to PCs for Skype, Echolink, or
whatever for the UV-3R. The Headset Buddy at $15 is better for its
"intended" purpose of letting you plug PC headsets and other things
into iPhones and newer Macs. :)
A new/random camcorder AV cable is far more common and disposable
these days. You're just going to need a continuity tester because
there isn't a "standard" as such. But you should have one of those
anyway if only to test for breaks or shorts in coax or something.
What does a cheap DMM go for these days?
For the record, if you go the headset buddy route, the smartphone
pinout is, from tip to sleeve:
Left (green tip)
Right (green ring)
Mic (Pink tip and ring)
Ground
The UV-3R is wired thusly (again, tip to sleeve):
Speaker/RXD
PTT/3v
Mic/TXD
Ground
If I'm understanding the diagram on miklor right, I think you need to
connect the first ring to 3v to tell the radio that you've plugged in
a programming cable since there'd be no other way for it to know.
And off the topic, but here for completeness, if anyone ever wants to
use the above information to wire up an iPhone or PC headset to a
radio, the PC microphone is supposed to have Mic on the tip and +5v
bias on the ring to power the common electret mic cartridge. Your
radio may output 5v or 8v for the same purpose. But if the radio's
input is made only for dynamic mics, an electret may let the magic
smoke out of your rig. Your modern HT is almost certainly built for
electrets. Your fancy contesting rig might not be.
One more thing… Just about every radio EXCEPT the UV-3R coming out
of China follows the same standards for programming cables, and there
is a ready-made source of FTDI-based cables for them. And if you
already know about RT Systems' products and dishonesty, you need not
read further…
It's not that RT Systems cables are overpriced. No, they are, but
they're good quality cables and we're in a vertical market. You want
to get ripped off? Buy Kenwood's Echolink cable kit for the TM-V71A.
It's a Mac to PC serial cable (yes really, check the pinout!) and
wiring the tips and sleeves of a couple stereo 35mm plugs to a PS/2
mouse connector. They want $60 for them, and I wouldn't tell you not
to give it to them. I would tell you that you can spend less and get
electrically identical cables. :)
No, the difference is that Kenwood doesn't misrepresent what they're
selling. You know you're buying two passive cables, and the radio's
user manual even tells you how they're wired so that you could make
your own.
RT Systems on the other hand, is not. They sell software (more power
to 'em) and FTDI-based USB to serial adapter cables. Except they
claim that their cables are not just USB to serial adapters (they
are). They claim their cables have special electronics to make
communication with the radio more reliable (they don't). Oh, and
each cable is made for a specific model of radio—two different models
of radio such as the Baofeng F-11 and UV-5R actually use different
cables and software (they don't). Of course, you have to pay for a
new RT Systems product to support your identical radio with a
different model number from China (you don't).
They do change the Vendor and Product IDs of their FTDI chips, which
actually solves some problems on Windows for their software—namely
that Windows COM ports have numbers instead of names, and you could
have as few as 0 or as many as 4 that don't actually exist. This is
an annoyance to Windows users who want to use something other than
their software, but not to Mac or Linux users, and it can be worked
around temporarily or permanently:
http://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/CableGuide_FTDI_OEM_Cables
…of course elsewhere on the CHIRP website, the developer says they do
not recommend RT Systems cables, and perhaps for Windows users,
without an option in their driver to explicitly enable the comport or
not, I might agree. But again, they sell a quality cable and I would
otherwise be able to recommend it to Windows users for headache-free
programming, and for Mac/Linux users for any purpose.
Except … they lied.
As long as they continue to misrepresent what they sell as a means of
justifying their prices and lock-in, I don't care how good the cable
is or what it costs. I'm going to steer people toward something
else, even if it were to take more work or cost more money or both.
In the case of the UV-3R, RT Systems doesn't make a cable, so you'd
HAVE to make one or deal with the fake Prolific chip headache. But
for anything else? Shop elsewhere, even if it means you need a
product like http://amzn.to/PqJ317 (FTDI to DB-9 serial) along with
http://amzn.to/PqJnNm (DB-9 serial to Kenwood). Oh, and that pair
happens to cost less than RT Systems' USB to Kenwood/Wouxun/etc cable
and you only need to buy it ONCE.
(Valley Enterprises also sells FTDI to Kenwood cables, but unless you
get them FROM Valley, they're probably Prolific clones Amazon lumps
in with the real thing. *sigh*)
Joseph - KF7QZC
On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 04:31:28PM -0400, Bill Barr wrote:
>I keep getting an error about radio not sendin ACK. 2009 MacBook 10.9.2. Baofeng uv-3r. Installed Python runtime and the USB serial driver.
>Thanks
>Bill
>
>Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Mar 11, 2014, at 3:03 PM, Bob Nielsen <n7xy at clearwire.net> wrote:
>>
>> Those have driver issues with Windows, but the built-in Prolific driver in OS X works fine for me with a Wouxun cable from Powerwerx using the daily-build of Chirp.
>>
>> Bob, N7XY
>>
>>> On Mar 11, 2014, at 11:41 AM, T. Joseph Carter <kf7qzc at spiritsubstance.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Prolific-based USB to serial cable for a Chinese radio?
>>>
>>> Joseph - KF7QZC
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 08:22:07AM -0500, richard radke wrote:
>>>> Thanks Dino that worked FB. Chirp still doesn’t recognize the radio, but I’m workin' on that now.
>>>>
>>>> Rick
>>>> W9WS
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Mar 10, 2014, at 9:49 PM, Dino Papas <kl0s at cox.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Rick - you have to install the “KK7DS Python Runtime” which is where I’m assuming you might be stuck - Mavericks won’t let you install it by simply double-clicking on the file. BUT you can overide the limitation by right-clicking on the installer —> “Open With” —> “installer.app (default)”.
>>>>>
>>>>> You only have to do that once and CHIRP should function normally after you’ve done that.
>>>>>
>>>>> Dino KL0S
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Mar102014, at 2238 PM, richard radke <rar100 at excite.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Has anyone found a work around for installing Chirp 0.3.1 radio programing app. with OS X 10.9.2 ??
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Rick
>>>>>> W9WS
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