Wouxon Programming Cable

February 5, 2018

The black programming cable that originally came with my Wouxon KG-UV3D refused to work under Windows 10. This may be because the "Prolific" USB-to-serial chip in the programmer is a fake, not sure (the black cable is described as "no longer supported" on the Powerwerx website - only the red cable is available now). Fake chip or no, the cable still worked in Linux, but that didn't do me much good on my many Win10 machines. So I snipped the USB plug and associated circuitry off the end of the cable, and wired jumpers to the three conductors inside.

Approach #1: Arduino

(a) First, I connected the cable's three conductors to the TX, RX, and GND pins of an Arduino Duemilanova board. I then tried idling the ATmega328 processor's RX and TX lines by setting them as inputs. This did not work.

(b) Next, I yanked out ATmega328, hoping to use the FTDI USB-to-serial chip on the Arduino board as my USB-to-TTL interface. This did not work either. I am particularly baffled by this, as the waveform off the FTDI (as viewed by oscilloscope) seemed to match what the original board put out.

(c) I then tried putting the '328 back in the socket and programming it to re-transmit incoming serial comms on the hardware serial port to a software serial port other pins, and vice versa. This worked perfectly. The code required is the classic Software Serial repeater routine.

#include <SoftwareSerial.h>

SoftwareSerial mySerial(10, 11); // RX, TX

void setup()

{

Serial.begin(9600);

while (!Serial) { ; }

mySerial.begin(9600);

}

void loop()

{

if (mySerial.available())

{ Serial.write(mySerial.read()); }

if (Serial.available())

{ mySerial.write(Serial.read()); }

}

Approach #2: WMR RIGtalk

I also tried using a West Mountain Radio RIGtalk. This device is simply a three-pin 3.3v USB-to-serial converter, so should be all we need. I normally use mine to allow my station computer to speak CAT to my Yaesu FT-897D. But in this case, it also worked very well for using CHIRP to speak to my HT.

Tip ---------- White

Ring -------- Red

Sleeve ----- Black

Also

Incidentally, the USB portion of the original adapter still works fine in Linux. I attached some #30 wires to the stubs of the outbound wires, and have goofed around with it with no issues.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse