Thursday, April 4, 2013

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>



3 comments:

  1. I know this is an old thread. After I modified the plist. The driver will not load. Invalid signature.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Answered my own question. Mac drivers now have to be signed. Modifying the info.plist changes the signature.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.