Ebay CAT Cable, Windows 7, 64 Bit

[K2PBO]

WORKING on WIN 7 64 BIT!

Hopefully, this will save someone a lot of time and frustration.

The drivers supplied by Kawa with the CAT cable sold on ebay did not work on Win 7, 64 bit on my new HP e9240f machine. I downloaded a new bunch of drivers in the 3.3 series that also did not work. Kawa responded to my email with a new (older set) that also did not work.

But extensive searching on the web got me to a "Greenwire IT" site where someone had posted a pointer to http://www.usglobalsat.com/download/546/win_drivers.zip

These are drivers for the Prolific 2303 chip (in the CAT cable) meant for a GPS. They downloaded and loaded perfectly, and soon the CAT cable was recognized by the PC without error codes. It still would not recognize the FT 897 in HRD (version 5 beta build 2434). I set it to Com 3 (used by the CAT cable) and it started to partially work, but showed errors. Dropping the speed to 4800 solved the rest. I did not need to set the RTS, CTS etc.

All in all many hours, but all ended ok. We need to pound on Prolific to supply up to date drivers for Win 7, 64 bit on their site.

Steve

[K2PBO]

Update

While the drivers work, there is a 1 seond or so latency in the Prolific chip or its drivers. This is not a major problem in using most of HRD, EXCEPT that the bandscope will not work.  See my comments in the interfacing part of the HRD Forum. I have emailed Prolific several times about this, but they will not support or communicate with end users. Overall, if I had known this in advance, I would have avoided the cheap Ebay CAT cables or any Prolific chip based product.

[G4HFQ]

Steve,

Try V3.2.0.0 on my Links page here:

 http://www.g4hfq.co.uk/links.html

I am using this version on Win7 64 and 32 bit, and on Vista 32 bit.

73,
Bob  G4HFQ