Making CHRIP work with Baofeng UV-5R on my Mac

So I was able to get all my memories dumped from my Yaesu into a CSV file.  Now how do I clone the memories on to my son's UV-5R?

Because I chose CHRIP this is actually possible because it supports both radios.  First step is to get a cable and corresponding driver working.

Again I chose from Ham Radio Outlet.  These guys are great.  Regardless of whether I spend $200 or $20, they always overnight ship and even when I order late, it magically appears on my doorstep at 10am the next day.  Its instant gratification!

I ordered the WXUSB made by Wouxun (who also make the Baofung UV-5R) and hoped again it would be a Prolific chipset or FTDI chipset.  I was not disappointed; it turned out to be a Prolific chipset with the default USB vendor id.

How to get it working

1. Download the driver for your 64bit OSX
2. Unpack the driver (double click on osx-pl2303.kext.zip)
3. Copy osx-pl2303.kext to /System/Library/Extensions
4. sudo cp -r ~/osx-pl2303.kext /System/Library/Extensions/

Load the driver

1. sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/osx-pl2303.kext
2. Plug your USB-to-Serial in
3. Test via: ls -l /dev/cu.PL2303-*

If you see a device with above name, you have installed your driver successfully

The next step was really following the directions of how to use CHIRP with the UV-5R. I found he's got a great site in general for the UV-5R.  I tried both the latest release build and the latest daily build and both worked great for this radio.  As always note that if you want to copy memories from one radio to another, first export them to a file.  Don't try to just download and then upload.  You will need to download from the destination radio, then import the exported file from earlier and then re-upload.  This is because each chirp image contains data specific to each radio.

Hope this helps.

How to get my RT systems cable for my Yaesu FT-60R to work with MacOS and CHIRP

I'm a new HAM and I recently purchased an Yaesu FT-60R dual band handheld transceiver.  I love the unit but find it difficult to verify that I have all the correct repeater frequencies, offsets, and tones programmed into my radio memories.

I use Mac OS X and Linux (and ChromeOS, Android, etc).  But I haven't used (nor supported) Windows in a very long time.  I noticed that Ham Radio Outlet sells a cable specific for my device (and drivers and sync software for windows)

I find it offensive when I buy a sync cable for a certain type of hardware and the vendor that made the cable just assumes that everyone is running windows and makes no mention of what kind of chipset a given cable uses.  I suspected that it used an FTDI or Prolific chipset. (Both of which are supported nicely on MacOS and Linux)

Ok, so I figured next I needed to select syncing software and I settled on CHIRP since it had the best support of devices and seems to be actively developed and supports both Linux and Mac (I think it might work on windows too)

However after I got the cable and plugged it into my MacBook it did not automatically show up as /dev/cu.XXYY as one would expect.  It turns out that it was an FTDI chipset with the USB product and vendor id's just changed.  Binding the driver to these new id's allows the driver to be loaded automatically when it is plugged in.

So here is how I solved the problem.

How to get my RT systems cable for my Yaesu to work with MacOS

1. Download the driver for Mac OS X here (I used FTDIUSBSerialDriver_v2_2_18.dmg )
2. Install the dmg the typical way.  It will require admin privs
3. Reboot
4. modify /System/Library/Extensions/FTDIUSBSerialDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist (see patch file)
5. sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/FTDIUSBSerialDriver.kext
6. plug in cable
7. ls -l /dev/cu.*
8. Use Chirp for Mac OS (You can download it from their website  )

Here is the patch file I used for my cable:

$ cat ct57a_cable.patch

--- /System/Library/Extensions/FTDIUSBSerialDriver.kext/Contents/bak.p 2012-08-08 05:04:45.000000000 -0700

+++ /System/Library/Extensions/FTDIUSBSerialDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist 2013-02-22 16:16:02.000000000 -0800

@@ -55,6 +55,23 @@

  <key>idVendor</key>

  <integer>2134</integer>

  </dict>

+ <key>CT57A Radio Cable</key>

+ <dict>

+ <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>

+ <string>com.FTDI.driver.FTDIUSBSerialDriver</string>

+ <key>IOClass</key>

+ <string>FTDIUSBSerialDriver</string>

+ <key>IOProviderClass</key>

+ <string>IOUSBInterface</string>

+ <key>bConfigurationValue</key>

+ <integer>1</integer>

+ <key>bInterfaceNumber</key>

+ <integer>0</integer>

+ <key>idProduct</key>

+ <integer>40529</integer>

+ <key>idVendor</key>

+ <integer>8448</integer>

+ </dict>

  <key>AMC232USB01</key>

  <dict>

  <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>