Hello,

Having just recently picking up a second Alinco DR-235 mobile, I was hoping to be able to do programming by computer for more convenience.  With my first Alinco DR-235, I had always just used it for an AllStar node, along with on occasion a couple of 1.25m/220 repeaters.  Since I only used a few channels, I just always programmed by front panel.  However, with this second Alinco DR-235 mobile, I I’m planning to use it in my vehicle and for while traveling, making it more convenient to program channels by computer since there will be many more channels.

After researching to find where you obtain a programming cable, I ordered and received a Prolific cable from “BlueMax49ers.com”.  I had ordered other cables from this particular seller before such as a FTDI cable for my Yaesu FT3DR which I use for both programming and Wires-X.  I even prefer this cable over the OEM FTDI SCU-19 cable for Wires-X due to its longer length.  All the cables I had ordered from the seller have worked perfectly in the past.

This particular cable for the DR-235 is being properly recognized and assigned a com port under all the OS’s I have tested it with: MacOS, Windows 10, Raspbian (RPi), and GNU/Linux (Slackware 15, x86_64).  The cable itself is working fine.

Both Chirp-Next and Chirp-Legacy are able to read the DR-235 without error under MacOS, Windows, Raspbian, and GNU/Linux.  However, then attempting to write back to the DR-235, Chirp-Next immediately errors out with “Encoding with ‘hex’ codec failed. TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not ‘str’”.  Chirp-Legacy, however, is more promising as it actually begins and writes back all the way until the display on the radio increments up to “LD FF00” and Chirp displays the error message “‘Serial’ object has no attribute to ‘_read’”.  Chirp on all the OS’s listed previously display these same errors and have the same behavior.  

It seems to me this is likely something with the .python driver for this particular radio as the cable itself is working(?).  I wish I knew more about Python coding as my speculation is that this error is something right st the conclusion of writing data to the radio and that a fix might be relatively simple (if one knew Python) (?)  If I could just have one means of being able to write data to the radio, I’d be content, however only being able to read the configuration off the radio to save it isn’t too useful unless it can also be written ti the radio.

I’m just curious if anyone else has this particular mobile (Alinco DR-235), Prolific cable (BlueMax49ers.com) that has been more successful using it?  Unless I can get it woking to write successfully to the radio, my likely course will be to rerun this particular cable and order the DR-235 (CPS+cable) package on RT Systems.  Unfortunately, the RT Systems CPS for this radio requires using their properiatary cable specifically for the Alinco DR-235 and the cable i have now will not work with it.

Thank you very much and have a great day!

-Jerry