UV-5R 2m/70cm Radio

Welcome to my Blog! I intend to document my journey into the mysterious world of amateur radio. I finally got around to sitting the foundation exam. Probably every new licencee's venture into Ham Radio is to buy one of these dinky little 2m/70cm FM radios. Let's face it, its no use lashing out thousands of pounds on an 'all singing all dancing' home base station when you may find yourself limited to what you can do with antennas, or maybe you just discover that the hobby is not for you. However, after the initial joy of tinkering with a few frequencies, I realised that to program this thing manually would be a nightmare. So a little research later, I discovered that I needed to install Chirp. This is where the problems started. I was struggling to get my UV-5R to communicate with the PC. I bought a cheap lead from Amazon thinking this would be OK. Apparently not! After trying countless drivers and set-ups, I finally conceded defeat.

 Then I realised that the radio can communicate using a FTDI UART to Serial USB converter lead. I remembered that I already had a few of these handy CP2102 gadgets lying around because of my microcontroller projects. I immediately chopped the head off the cable I had bought and soldered the wires onto it. When plugged in and connected to Chirp software, it immediatley started to clone the radio. So, to anyone struggling with this, just bear in mind that you will not go wrong with this type of lead. You can knock one up yourself like the diagram above and use 3.5mm and 2.5mm separate jack plugs. Just remember TX radio to RX converter and vice versa. Good luck!