Recommendations for purchasing a USB radio programming cable: Anything with a REAL Prolific or FTDI chip should be fine as well. The KeySpan USA-19HS is a very solid USB adapter that has many benefits and is not sold under another name, nor does it use a variety of chips as do many other cables. In reality, this is a much safer option as you only have to find a solid USB adapter once, and you can use it with many cables. With such a cable, you can choose your own (or try many) USB adapters to get a working setup.
Saving $10-15 on a cable might cost you a good bit of time and frustration trying to get it all to work.Ĭables that use only a 9-pin serial connection take a lot of guesswork out of the equation. If you use Microsoft Windows, finding the right driver and keeping it working can be quite a chore. The low cost cables use counterfeit Prolific USB chips. Third party cables are available for most radios with a range of costs and quality. These cables generally work ok with Linux. The exception to this are the very low cost USB cables that come with many Chinese radios that use a counterfeit Prolific USB to serial chip that has a number of driver problems with recent versions of Microsoft Windows. However, these are usually the most expensive and are not always the most convenient (because of a lack of USB, etc). In some cases, the manufacturer of your radio produces the highest quality cable for programming.
I much prefer this information to be user-maintained and contributed! Note: as this is user-submitted content, the recommendations and opinions here are not necessarily shared by Dan and other primary CHiRP contributors. If you have corrections or additions to this page, please submit them to me, or ask for edit privileges.
This page is a collection of user submitted information on radio programming cables.