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Baofeng Baofeng BF F8HP Cable for Mac

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Monu

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Mar 14, 2019
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So my brand new Baofeng arrived last week and I thought I had beat the system and found a $6 USB cable online at Walmart. I plugged it in and fired up the radio and.... nothing. So now I have resigned myself to purchase the official $20 cable with the correct chip. Here is my question: Will the appropriate cable work with my Mac (running Mojave) or will I need to download additional drivers to make the correct cable work.

I have downloaded CHIRP and when I try to clone I get an error message that it did not read the radio.

The current USB is not being read by Finder or in my About Mac.

The cable that I got from walmart had a CD that came with it. It looked like it had three different drivers, but they were all windows based (exc?)

And yes, I'm new to all of this in case it wasn't obvious by this point :)

any help is greatly appreciated.
 

dmaria

Member
Joined
May 24, 2010
Messages
295
There are two kinds of cables. Those that have a chip inside (Prolific or FTDI) and those that are known as a straight thru cable. If you purchased the straight thru cable, then the usb chip is expected to be built into the radio. If you plug in one of these cables, no drivers will be loaded because there is no chip. Not knowing what cable you purchased, it is hard to determine where your problem is.
 

dmaria

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May 24, 2010
Messages
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I should also add that the Prolific drivers for Windows were changed years ago so they would not work with the Chinese clones of their chips. I don't know how Apple handles these situations, but it's possible they may have the same problem.
 

Monu

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Mar 14, 2019
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Thanks for the replies folks. I went ahead and purchased the "official" cable. Plugged it in and it worked fine. Now I tried to import to scanner codes in CHIRP. I was able to clone my radio, but when I try to import, I get a message saying I need to install a suds package into python. I think I downloaded one and I have no clue what to do from here. At this point, I'm just looking up codes and manually adding the to the scanner via CHIRP.

So any help on this Suds Package thing?
 
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