Baofent UV-5R: Go Figure

[W3WN]

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.

[W3WN]

Oh, forgot to mention... the new firmware is known as N5R-21x and N5R-31x (and higher numbers, of course). The '21' is for dual band rig,s the '31' is for triband.

[NQ6U]

My personal experience with the UV-5R and CHirp is that it worked the best on a MacBook Pro booted up in Ubuntu Linux. I couldn't get the same computer to talk to the radio under OS X and trying a different computer running Windows XP didn't work either. Go figure.

[W3WN]

Well, I was concerned about the cable, since there are so many cables out there running the bootleg Prolific chips. The good news is that the "official" Baofeng (Pofung) cable that I bought last year DOES have the correct chip and DOES run with the updated drivers.

Now, if I can just figure out why the Jetstream JT270 software and cable isn't working right... that will be the next thing...

[WX7P]

I had the exact opposite problem.

I got a red UV5RPlus (to go with the yellow, blue, black and camo ones) from Sarah as a joke. I'm styling. I have all the colors!

I downloaded the current CHIRP and the new red Baofeng did it's thing just fine.

SOOOOOOOOOOO, I decided to reprogram the black one with WA repeaters. The Radio downloaded fine, but when I tried to upload the new list I got an error message.

I then closed CHIRP and opened it again with the black one hooked up. This time it worked. I don't know why, don't care.

How do you check the firmware again?

[n2ize]

I have a UV5R. Sometimes, for whatever reason it doesn't seem to want to communicate with CHIRP. But if I disconnect the radio, turn it off then on again, plug the cable back in and restart CHIRP it suddenly works fine. Most of the time it works fine though,.

[KC2UGV]

My personal experience with the UV-5R and CHirp is that it worked the best on a MacBook Pro booted up in Ubuntu Linux. I couldn't get the same computer to talk to the radio under OS X and trying a different computer running Windows XP didn't work either. Go figure.

It's the driver. Linux was built to talk serial, so it's serial drivers are generally always top notch when compared to other OS's (Except maybe for embedded OS's).

[KF4ZGZ]

Rumor has it that Prolific and Window have tag-teamed to make sure the newer stuff renders anything other than prolific chips useless once the new drivers have been installed.

Matt

[KC2UGV]

Rumor has it that Prolific and Window have tag-teamed to make sure the newer stuff renders anything other than prolific chips useless once the new drivers have been installed.

Matt

No rumor...

http://www.electronista.com/articles/14/10/23/driver.changes.fake.ftdi.chip.settings.renders.it. unusable/

[n2ize]

Stay away from the Windows !!!

[W3WN]

Stay away from the Windows !!!But they have such a nice view of the barge traffic on the Allegheny River.

[W3WN]

After I got the UV-5 programmed, I offered to take a crack at W3WH's Jetstream JT270M.

The cable that comes with the Jetstream uses the same driver as the Baofeng cable, which I expected. No problems there.

The Jetstream wasn't communicating quite right with the CHIRP software. Probably a mistake I was making. To be specific, i could download the "factory settings" (which I saved as a configuration file, just in case), but had fits importing the generic CSV file I'd set up for the Baofeng. Tried to get the columns set up in the same order... well, I just didn't have a lot of time to futz with it.

So I used the Jetstream software.

Actually, it's pretty easy, once you get the hang of it. The important columns are the RX frequency, the TX frequency -- it doesn't use the offsets, at least not in memory -- the PL tones, and the (optional) 7 character description. Took me about a half hour, but when I was done, Bill now has 40 local 2 meter & 70 cm repeaters programmed in, plus some simplex, and NOAA weather.

Also noticed that this rig will receive 222 MHz repeaters. Not transmit, though. Wonder if that's coming in a future model?

Didn't have an antenna handy for the rig, so testing will have to take place later. I'm sure I'll be doing some tweaking as time goes by.

It's a cute little rig. For about $130, it's almost another "throw away" rig. If it works half way decently on the air, I may just have to pick one up, to play with.