I often criticize hams who are cheap, but in truth, I’m probably just as cheap as anyone in amateur radio. Case in point, when I bought my $25 Baofeng UV-5RA, I bought the cheap programming cable for it, even though I had a hunch that it wouldn’t work. (Baofeng UV-5Rs now go for about $30 on Amazon.)
Even though I kind of expected it not to work, I was disappointed when it didn’t. I wasted an hour or two searching websites for information and trying things, such as shaving off some of the plastic around the connectors to get a tighter fit. After a while, I just gave up, and then spent some time figuring out how to program it manually. Programming the Baofeng manually is nearly impossible, though, and after an hour, I had only managed to get the two most popular repeaters into memory.
Figuring that the cable was just junk, I tried to sell it at the Monroe hamfest in June. I was only asking $2, but when I told guys that it didn’t work, they put it back on the table and walked away. Now, I’m glad that I didn’t sell it.
About a month ago, I ran across a blog post, Build your Own Programming Cable, by John ‘Miklor’ K3NXU. The gist of the post is that you can replace the little USB – serial converter board in the dongle with a board that uses a CP2102 chip (see right). This board does the same thing that the non-functional board does, and this one works! I paid $3.40 to have mine shipped free from China. It took about two weeks to get here.
A couple of days ago, I got around to trying it out. I popped open the dongle case, unsoldered the three wires, and then soldered those wires to some jumpers supplied with the board that have little connectors that fit onto the header you see in the picture above.
I downloaded Chirp, then plugged the cable into the Baofeng. Nada. I tried the Wouxoun KG-UVD1P and got the same result. Disappointed again, I re-read the blog post and found this, “Note 1: Some boards may have the TxD and RxD reversed. If it doesn’t work the first time, reverse the two wires. No damage has been done.” I reversed the TX and RX wires, and BINGO, it worked like a charm.
It’s really amazing how much easier it is to program the Baofeng with Chirp. I wish I’d run across this blog post a year ago.
So, if you have a programming cable that doesn’t work, don’t despair. Even if you don’t have a cable, you can make your own completely from scratch. The blog post shows you how to do this as well.
RT Systems makes it even easier…. no soldering required…
True, but at a price. The cost of the cable ($30 for the Baofeng cable) is as much as the cost of the radio! That’s not the point of the post, though. The point is that with a little handiword (surely unsoldering and re-soldering three wires isn’t so difficult) you can use a cable that you already have.
That’s great info, Dan. You may have just saved some people many hours of searching! You would have saved me about $20, had I read this post prior to purchasing a cable… I think the most exciting thing about this hobby is making things work, rather than buying working units and plugging them in ;)
As a tip: If you haven’t bought the cheap cable yet, and you don’t like tinkering – the Baofeng FTDI cable is by far worth it. https://baofengtech.com/pccable