CHIRP

Have you tried the latest daily version? At the bottom of the downloads page, there is a link to the daily repository.

Yeah I have, the latest version won't even open on my Mac, it says 'str' object has no attribute 'format'`

Ah, well, that is a problem :(

I'll need to resolve that first, which will probably take a few days.

Sorry, the above should have been this build:

http://trac.chirp.danplanet.com/chirp_daily/old/daily-11172011/

Now getting an error saying unable to fetch CHIRP when I open the program for first use...

Thanks for your help it is appreciated! :)

Oh, dang, there was another build-related issue unrelated to this.. I bet it was right around that time. However, in looking at the change history, I think I was thinking of a change that happened shortly after 0.1.11, not 0.1.12. So, I would expect 0.1.12 to work for you.

You press the button on the radio to transmit, after clicking OK on the clone settings dialog... and then what? The radio says "Clone Error" after a while and CHIRP just never sees anything? Can you find the debug.log file? It should be in your home directory, in a hidden directory called ".chirp". If so, please send that to me.

What kind of cable are you using?

oh and CHIRP does recognise when the cable is present and when it is not...

Hmm, so your test with the G4HFQ software was under Windows, yes? Presumably in a virtual system where you passed the entire USB device through and let Windows use its own driver, right?

The debug log shows a small burp of data being read from the radio, but not the right header and not enough data. This would tend to lead me to think about the USB driver being used, and potentially an incorrect baud rate being set. It seems that MacOS users have the most trouble getting a reliable PL2303 driver loaded. Where did you get yours? May I ask you to try sourcing one directly from Prolific's website to see if it makes any difference?

I did get it directly from Prolific site however thats interesting about Baud rate etc. what should the settings be for CHIRP?

Oh and yeah it was passed through a virtual windows 7 machine running through Parallels

CHIRP sets the appropriate baud rate for the radio you're using (which is 38400 for the VX8). However, if the driver doesn't honor the rate setting, then the behavior you're seeing would make sense.

I'm not familiar with Maxton devices, so I'm really not sure what to say. If you try the same version of CHIRP in your windows VM and it works, then I really have no other suggestion other than to point at the MacOS driver for the cable.

You might join and post to the chirp_users mailing list. There are several MacOS users there that are more "up" on some of the driver issues. You might get a better answer there. In the past, several discussions have ensued about choosing the right MacOS driver, so I know there is some confusion in that space. A quick scan of the previous threads didn't turn up much, other than someone else with a similar problem that moved to a different cable entirely (which did work, by the way).