Radio Shack Program Cable

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tonya

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I have what I think is a RS-260-183 programimg cable and can't find the disc it came with. I did find on this forum a site (page 6) from radio shack to download the driver for this cable but I still can,t get it to work on Windows 7. Has anyone else had this problem? Any solutions?
 

michaelmikesj

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You should plug it in and then in hardware manager click on find new hardware. That should work. Then once the driver is downloaded. Right click the driver and click "Run as administrator" that should get it to work properly.
 

dispatcher812

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I also had the same problem with that cable. I did some searching and found that W 7 does not support that cable. Weather you use the disk or just plug it in.
 

N1BHH

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Don't download or install a driver unless the machine asks for it. I have a Windows 7 laptop and never had the driver. I didn't need it with my XP machine because I had drivers already for other USB cables and devices and it assigned a com port once I plugged the cable into the computer. When I plugged my cable into the Windows 7 machine it asked me if I wanted the drivers and it found and installed it in less than a minute from my connecting it. It works flawlessly for me.
 

N1BHH

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I thought I explained it. I plugged in the cable and it asked if I wanted drivers and in less than a minute they were installed and ready. You never connect to the radio until after you connect to the computer. Computers look for a chip set and configure accordingly.
 

dispatcher812

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I thought I explained it. I plugged in the cable and it asked if I wanted drivers and in less than a minute they were installed and ready. You never connect to the radio until after you connect to the computer. Computers look for a chip set and configure accordingly.

You did but you did not mention the scanner. I was asking for a clarification and you supplied. Thank you.
 
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tonya

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It did attempt to look for drivers when I plugged in and could not find. I then went into device mgr saw that a serial cable was connected but it had a yellow ! with it and nothing that that says Raio Shack USB to Serial like it does on my other computer. Again tried to update software and it could'nt find?? Also uninstalled and tried to reinstall no luck??
 

tonya

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Just an FYI for anyone having the problem I was having with win7. I found an old Gigaware USB-A serial cable disc I bought at RS years ago part # 26-949 and loaded it. I only had the Vista option to use so I went with it. I plugged in the cable, the drivers were found and everything is working fine now. Thanks for everyones help!!
 

n5ims

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On my Windows 7 machine the cable shows up in Device Manager saying simply "USB Serial Port (COM4)" and nothing with "Radio Shack" on it. When I set my software to use COM4 it works fine. On my system I'm using the generic chipset drivers and not the Radio Shack drivers.

Since there's nothing special about the cable's USB section, it probably makes no difference which drivers are used in many cases. In reality, the generic drivers may be preferred since they're probably newer and may have fixed some bugs and most likely will be available for newer versions of Windows while the RS drivers may be stuck on the older Vista versions.
 

gmclam

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USB to COM cables

The cable works just fine under Windows 7, once you have the correct driver installed. The procedure you should follow is to first plug the USB end into your PC without connecting a scanner. If you are not asked for a driver, it could be because one is already installed.

When the cable is connected, the driver installed, and things are working correctly, you will see the cable show up as a COM port under the USB section in Device Manager. If you do not have the (correct) driver installed, that is also where you can launch to install/update to the correct driver. All you need is the FTDI driver for W7. It is used for many different devices and that's one reason you might already have it installed.

Also; you'll see the COM port number assigned to the cable from Device Manager. You'll typically need that to set the COM port in the software you are using.
 

AC2OY

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Yeah what they said...lol only trouble I had was my gateway PC was it has two USB ports in front and maybe 4 in the back and if I didn't plug the cable into the exact one if forgot...lol so once I went into the device manager and renabled it all was well:)
 
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