I also believe that the current FTDI chipset will remember its com port number even if you plug it into a different USB port which is nice and you aren't plugging the cable in only to tell  you it is Com54.  :)  Hence the reason you might want to clean up your old ports with what I sent earlier.

It is hard to solve if you only get the USB to radio programming cable and you have no choice but to back rev their driver.

If you go for the RS232 to radio programming cable, then you do have the option of using a USB certified RS232 port.  Going back to the RS232 (DB9 connector) is my failsafe that always works.

Mike va3mw


On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 6:06 AM, Jim Unroe <rock.unroe@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:00 AM, kc6iih <kc6iih@aol.com> wrote:
The exclamation mark means you have a conflict.  Fix your port settings.


Jock KC6IIH

Jock,

You are partially correct.

The exclamation mark is because there is a conflict with the driver and the chip in the programming cable.

Most inexpensive programming cables have an unauthorized copy of Prolific's USB-to-Serial chip in them. These copied chips use the same Prolific driver that the genuine Prolific chips require. Prolific eventually changed their drivers after v3.3.2.105 to not function (hence the error) with the unauthorized copies.

Windows Vista and newer (ie: 7, 8 & 8.1), will automatically install the latest driver when a USB cable with a Prolific type chip is plugged into a USB port that doesn't already have a driver configured. If the cable has an unauthorized chip, the driver installation is guaranteed to fail.

The only fix that will eliminate the conflict with an unauthorized Prolific chip is to downgrade the driver to at least v3.3.2.105. Some of the Chinese programming software have a conflict with the v3.3.2.102 or v3.3.2.105 Prolific driver versions (CHIRP has no such issues and runs fine) so the general recommendation is to downgrade to the v3.2.0.0 driver.

Windows XP does not automatically install the latest driver, but is recommended that v2.0.2.1 is the driver version to install to avoid a conflict with an unauthorized copy of the Prolific chip.

Other solutions would be to purchase and use a programming cable with genuine Prolific chip or a programming cable with another brand of chip (FTDI for example).

Jim KC9HI

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