Bug #11200
closed
Retevis RT95 -No intial response from radio
Added by Darren Crane over 1 year ago.
Updated over 1 year ago.
I read the instructions above:
Yes
Description
My Retevis RT95 will not connect to CHIRP. I have used CHIRP to program this radio and others for years. This is not a new radio and I am not new to CHIRP. All of a sudden I have to spend hours trying address driver issues with the abomination that is Prolific, only to find that the radio can not be read by CHIRP anyway. I understand that nonsense with Windows 11 is not your fault but I am incredibly frustrated at the moment as all I wanted to do was add 3 frequencies to my radio not spend my entire Saturday morning chasing issues with a program that has always worked in the past. This issue is present with CHIRP-next and Legacy.
Files
This driver hasn't changed since August of 2023, and even that was just a typo fix. I'd check your serial stuff as the log indicates that there's zero communication with the radio, so there's not anything to go on other than that. Knowing it's a prolific cable/driver is (as you probably know) a big red flag.
Your programming cable is manufactured with a Prolific USB-to-Serial chip and has been assigned COM7. The debug.log mentions "WARNING: Unable to select 'COM7', defaulting to ('COM1', 'COM1: Communications Port (COM1)')". The process fails because COM1 is not your programming cable.
This is a pretty good indication that the chip in your programming cable is either a PL2303HXA or PL2303TA chip. Both are considered EOL (End Of Life) by the Prolific company (manufacturer of the chip and supplier of the driver to Microsoft). As their chips become EOL, support for them is removed from the driver. The latest Prolific driver automatically installed by Windows currently requires the Prolific PL2303GS chip (the PL2303HXA went EOL over a decade ago and the PL2303TA went EOL within the last couple of years).
Workarounds for this are...
- Get a programming cable with a chip from a different chip vendor (FTDI, Silicon Labs, WCH, etc). Bluemax49ers provides an FTDI chip version of the Retevis RT95 programming cable.
- Replace the module on the USB end of your programming cable with one containing a chip from a different chip vendor. This Building your Own Programming Cable page explains the process.
- To allow the programming cable that you already have to work you need to download, install and manually select the older Prolific v3.2.0.0 driver. It was available back when the PL2303HXA was still being manufactured. It also works fine for the newer but EOL PL2303TA and latest PL2303GS chips. The problem this workaround is Windows may update the driver behind your back and the programming cable will Once you realize that this happened, most of the time you will just have to re-select the older driver. Every once-in-a-while Windows will remove the older driver. In that case you will have to re-install it again (so it is wise to keep the v3.2.0.0 driver file handy). A link for the driver and instructions for installing and selecting it are here.
Change your cable. RT95 works perfectly with chirp. Did you try official programming software? You can find it on Anytone website (AT-778UV).
Device manager showed an error with windows 11 not recognizing the device. I forgot the exact message but rolling the driver back to 2015 or something worked to see it as com port 7. That process involved watching several YouTube videos 3 of which didn't work for me. (2008 driver roll back) Once all of that was sorted out "read from radio" resulted in the failure message I submitted here. I ended up giving up and manually programing the channels I needed. Later on out of curiosity I tried a different PC. This works sometimes my RC drone programing issues. It ended up working so I'll close this issue.
This is a common problem when using programming cables manufactured with the Prolific PL2303 UART chips prior to PL2303GS with Windows. It is good to see you programming cable is working with the older driver.
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