On Tue, Aug 20, 2024 at 07:06 PM, Ham Radio wrote:
*UPDATE* The root cause of this issue is an illegal cloned chip in an older Baofeng cloning cable. ?I was told today that new Baofeng cloning cables should not have any issue.
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Bernie Murphy
VE3FWF Ottawa, Canada
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Not necessarily an "illegal cloned chip". As the Prolific company deems any of their chips EOL (End-Of-Life), they drop support for it in their driver. This affects all chips of that series, genuine or not. For example the EOL PL2303HX support was removed over a decade ago. Recently with the release of the v3.8.40.0 driver support for the EOL PL2303TA chip was removed. To support a Prolific chip out of the box with this driver or later requires the presence of the PL2303GS chip.
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Baofeng has started to manufacture cables with the WCH CH3440 chip. Since it is not a Prolific type chip, it does not have the issue of dropped support. Unfortunately, most of the time when purchasing a "Baofeng" labeled programming cable, unless specifically stated in the listing, you will not know which chip it is manufactured with.
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My recommendation for those purchasing their first programming cable is to avoid any where the vendor does not specify in the listing which chip is used. If it doesn't say, keep looking. Programming cables with FTDI chips are almost always mention in the listing it has an FTDI chip which is the reason that they are so highly recommended.
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Jim KC9HI
