W3WN
01-06-2015, 02:30 PM
KB3ERQ and I have each owned a UV-5R for about a year now. I picked it up to have a cheap little HT at work, in part to monitor our club's 440 repeater (we'd had some issues with a commercial landscaping outfit bootlegging on the repeater to coordinate some snow plows last winter, but I digress)
Last November, W3WH won a "black box" prize at a local hamfest, which included a UV-5R. I was over at Bill's the other day, and he asked me if I could program his, since he was having some issues with the software.
No problem. Or so I thought.
Brought the rig in to work today, put the Baofeng USB-to-UV5 cable on the old XP laptop, uploaded the latest CHIRP software, and went to download the HT "image" to the laptop (so I could then import a CSV file with the repeaters and other frequencies that Bill wanted). Download to laptop works fine... only nothing comes up.
Grabbed my UV5... download works fine, and the entire memory configuration appears. So, I'm wondering, WTF?
After futzing with it for a few hours, on & off between Help Desk calls... discovered that there's been a firmware update for the "newer" UV-5's. Sure enough, mine is before, Bill's is after. So, now what?
Just for the hell of it, I went over to my Windows 8.1 machine, uploaded the latest Prolific driver (XP uses an older version), loaded CHIRP... everything works perfectly, on both HT's.
So, tomorrow night at the club meeting, Bill will be a happy camper. (He'll be happier if he gets an actual antenna on the rig, not the factory installed dummy load).
All Ben & I can figure is that the newer UV-5R firmware will only work properly with the newer Prolific drvier(s). The older firmware isn't as fussy.
Just thought I'd mention it, before someone starts tearing the hair out over the same issue.
Last November, W3WH won a "black box" prize at a local hamfest, which included a UV-5R. I was over at Bill's the other day, and he asked me if I could program his, since he was having some issues with the software.
No problem. Or so I thought.
Brought the rig in to work today, put the Baofeng USB-to-UV5 cable on the old XP laptop, uploaded the latest CHIRP software, and went to download the HT "image" to the laptop (so I could then import a CSV file with the repeaters and other frequencies that Bill wanted). Download to laptop works fine... only nothing comes up.
Grabbed my UV5... download works fine, and the entire memory configuration appears. So, I'm wondering, WTF?
After futzing with it for a few hours, on & off between Help Desk calls... discovered that there's been a firmware update for the "newer" UV-5's. Sure enough, mine is before, Bill's is after. So, now what?
Just for the hell of it, I went over to my Windows 8.1 machine, uploaded the latest Prolific driver (XP uses an older version), loaded CHIRP... everything works perfectly, on both HT's.
So, tomorrow night at the club meeting, Bill will be a happy camper. (He'll be happier if he gets an actual antenna on the rig, not the factory installed dummy load).
All Ben & I can figure is that the newer UV-5R firmware will only work properly with the newer Prolific drvier(s). The older firmware isn't as fussy.
Just thought I'd mention it, before someone starts tearing the hair out over the same issue.