Danger Will Robinson!!! Do not do this on Baofeng radios! Other brands should be okay--- read on for the reason and get ready to laugh.
A tech at a large 2 way radio shop in NorCal told me what happens when you cable clone Baofeng radios.
So, on a Motorola, Icom, Kenwood, etc, there are soft pot values for things like frequency compensation, audio levels, etc. These are stored in separate memory areas from the "codeplug" / "personality" data and are only normally accessed by a special menu in the programming software.
When you use the cable cloning, certain values get copied and clobber those on the target radio. What's worse, sometimes they get corrupted in the process.
They had a correctional institution come to them for help after they'd bought dozens of these things and run them through the megabit Mixmaster. The end result.... Deviation either nonexistent on transmit or slammed 50+ kilocycles wide.... Radios up to 200k off frequency... The customer complaint was that their repeater wasn't hearing the radios though there were a few pairs of radios that would still talk simplex to each other.
They to e-waste the whole lot as there were no saved files from these things to recover from.
I couldn't tell you if firmware mismatch was involved but it would not surprise me at all.
On Sat, Sep 15, 2018, 1:18 PM Peter ptlambert@sbcglobal.net wrote:
I recently ordered this TENQ "cloning" cable from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MK02BX2
This cable has Kenwood style connectors (3.5mm TRS & 2.5mm TRS) on each end, for radio-to-radio configuration copy between Baofeng, Wouxun, and "any two-pin style radio with a Kenwood Baofeng plug".
I wanted to verify the pinout before adding it to my radio bag. So I spent several hours scouring the Internet for a wiring diagram for such a cable, but with no success. Even simple pinout descriptions were somewhat vague ("back-to-back", etc.). So I ultimately buzzed out the cable with a DVM, tabulated the results, and mocked up a JPEG diagram based on an image that originally came from Miklor.com. See attached for the finished product. The diagram shows that the cable basically has Data Tx from one end connected to Data Rx on the other and vice-versa, with Data Ground connected between both ends.
I wanted to submit this to John for possible inclusion on his site, but I don't see any contact form there. I do know that he posts to this list so here I am... John, if you are interested, feel free to re-post wherever you'd like, maybe here?
http://www.miklor.com/COM/UV_Technical.php
Cheers! (Peter)
P.S. I do understand that this list is for CHIRP issues, hence any cable discussion would normally be limited to "programming" cables, e.g. Kenwood to USB with a suitable integrated controller chip. However, I am thinking that this info might be useful to some folks here regardless. _______________________________________________ chirp_users mailing list chirp_users@intrepid.danplanet.com http://intrepid.danplanet.com/mailman/listinfo/chirp_users This message was sent to Tom KG4CYX at blueneon@gmail.com To unsubscribe, send an email to chirp_users-unsubscribe@intrepid.danplanet.com