Mitch, That's an unusual "opportunity". I've used the cheaper cables from eBay on different radio's with CHIRP and had no problems, HOWEVER: When I program my UV-5R, none of them work at all, except a DB9 cable that came with my Kenwood TK-3170 commercial radio. Nothing special here. WinXP Pro, SP3 etc. on my $100 swap meet cheapie Dell laptop. I use the laptop for Field Day, programming radio's and 'dats it. Milton N6MG

I am successfully using Chirp on a MacBook Pro to program Baofeng UV-5R and Wouxun KG-UVA1 radios. I am using the latest daily builds, currently CHIRP daily-20120912.

I am using an unknown cheap EBay programming cable. The only quirk I have found is that the software will only read from or write to the radios one time. You then have to unplug the cable, plug it back in, and it will work again for another time, a trivial inconvenience. I do not have this problem using the same cable, same build, on a netbook running Windows 7.

The Chirp software is great and I especially like the ability to query frequency data bases for area repeaters, as I travel quite a bit.

Mitch, W4OA