CHIRP

CHIRP does not load the USB Drivers. The USB Drivers must be loaded before you start chirp.

Based on the price you paid you may have a counterfeit FTDI chip or Prolific chip in your cable. The real FTDI cables run about $20 each. The only reliable vendor for Baofeng PC03 FTDI cables on Amazon is BTECH.

You might try looking at these two sites to try and troubleshoot the driver issues.

To determine the chipset:
https://plugable.com/2011/07/12/installing-a-usb-serial-adapter-on-mac-os-x/

Drivers that worked for my fake prolific cable:
http://www.miklor.com/COM/UV_Drivers.php#mac

Thanks Jeremy.
Oh what fun serial drivers on Macs for Chinese hardware is...

For me, a combination of a different serial cable my brother bought with his "version" of the UV-5R plus the Plugable site was the trick. I tried two other drivers without obtaining complete install success, including uninstalls. I could not get the serial interface (cu.xxx) into the /dev location until I used the driver for the latest Mac OS (Sierra, not High Sierra) from here: https://plugable.com/drivers/prolific/. I did install the driver with the radio and the working cable attached to the Mac - not sure if that makes a difference but before the driver install I did see USB Serial Driver in the USB System Information panel - a good sign but not sufficient to get the port to show up on Chrip - that took a driver that got the interface into /dev.

So it was the cable. Not sure which one he bought - we're working on determining that but it looks different than many of the cables on Amazon (including mine) that have an indented silver plate with the BaoFeng name inside. Those are no good it seems. His is a black sticker with no raised molding.

I'll likely just buy the BTech $20 cable but since the entire rig only cost $35... Oh well!
Now I need to learn how to use Chirp.. ;-)

Thanks again for the pointers.

Rob McClure wrote:

Thanks Jeremy.
Oh what fun serial drivers on Macs for Chinese hardware is...

For me, a combination of a different serial cable my brother bought with his "version" of the UV-5R plus the Plugable site was the trick. I tried two other drivers without obtaining complete install success, including uninstalls. I could not get the serial interface (cu.xxx) into the /dev location until I used the driver for the latest Mac OS (Sierra, not High Sierra) from here: https://plugable.com/drivers/prolific/. I did install the driver with the radio and the working cable attached to the Mac - not sure if that makes a difference but before the driver install I did see USB Serial Driver in the USB System Information panel - a good sign but not sufficient to get the port to show up on Chrip - that took a driver that got the interface into /dev.

So it was the cable. Not sure which one he bought - we're working on determining that but it looks different than many of the cables on Amazon (including mine) that have an indented silver plate with the BaoFeng name inside. Those are no good it seems. His is a black sticker with no raised molding.

I'll likely just buy the BTech $20 cable but since the entire rig only cost $35... Oh well!
Now I need to learn how to use Chirp.. ;-)

Thanks again for the pointers.

Oh, let me ask. Does the FTDI cable from BTech use the same Prolific chip so should work with the driver I have installed?