A little over a year ago, I did quite a bit of research using MS Windows 7 64-bit and a programming cable containing an unauthorized copy of a Prolific USB-to-serial chip. What I did was to install and try every Prolific driver version that I could find. What I found is that the newest driver that you can successfully install is Prolific v3.3.2.105. Any newer version than that and the driver will detect the unauthorized chip and refuse to work.

CHIRP and the Prolific v3.3.2.105 driver worked fine together. But if you are also using other programming software along with CHIRP (the Baofeng software written in VB6, for example), then there can still be compatibility issues with this driver. For me, the Baofeng software would not launch with the v3.3.2.105 driver installed. I found that to be compatible with the chip in the cable and the VB6 software, I had to fall back to the Prolific v3.2.0.0 driver.

The v3.2.0.0 driver is a MS Windows Vista driver, but it is being successfully used for Windows 7 and 8. So this is the Prolific driver version that I recommend. The important thing is to not let the OS automatically update the driver to the latest available version.

I've been told that the driver of choice for MS Windows XP is Prolific v2.0.2.1. I've not tested drivers for XP like I have for 7, but this is the driver that I installed and use on my XP machine.

Links to these drivers are available on the "Drivers and USB Cables" page of the Miklor.com website.

Since then, I've acquired programming cables with a genuine Prolific chip, an FTDI chip and even made my own cable using a module containing Silicon Labs CP2102 chip. So I have multiple ways of avoiding the counterfeit Prolific chip issue. I still keep the v3.2.0.0 driver handy, though.

Jim KC9HI