The stereo cable connects to the rig and the micro-USB connector, as seen in Figure 4, provides the USB/serial connection to the laptop. Figure 2 shows what that finished project looks like. If they are all taken, select one that you know is not connected and ignore the resulting error message.Īfter getting the breadboard version working, I decided to make a more permanent version that I can keep in the toolbox for use when I change my mind about what frequencies to have stored. There will be a drop-down box available there to change the Com port to something in the range of 1 to 4. Click on Properties and then click on Advanced Properties. First, go into Device Manager select the serial port that you need to change. If you run into this kind of problem, here is how to change it in Windows. Older software such as this did not allow for more than a small number of Com ports, 4 in this case, so I had to manually reconfigure the USB serial port to one that it did recognize. Figure 1 is the resulting schematic.Īt first, I bread-boarded this to make sure that it worked but, due to the age of the cloning software that ICOM provides (Windows 95/98 based!), it did not recognize my USB serial port at first. That led to a decision to use a common USB to TTL serial converter, also known as a “FTDI Friend” (see the parts list below for sources). I played with the idea of building a straight-forward RS232 converter but decided that this wouldn’t be elegant since the laptop I use for Ham operations does not have a RS232 port and thus I would need a USB to RS232 converter on top of the level converter. The schematics all indicated that the OPC-478U cable was nothing more than a RS232 to TTL level converter, so I decided “I can build that.” Home Brewing the OPC-478U Radio Programming Cable Clone I quickly found a plethora of schematics for clone cables. $45 for a cable? Well, that dog won’t hunt! So, back to the web and my best friend, Google. The local Ham Radio Outlet had the software in stock (Dear ICOM: why can’t I buy this software and download it on-line?) so that was easy. I pretty quickly figured out that I needed a new OPC-478U cable and some software. Of course this meant that I needed to look into how to do this without punching a lot of buttons on the rig. I recently obtained an ICOM V8000 rig from a fellow ham and decided to change the channel programming that he had been using to match that of my other rigs. This article explains how to home brew your own USB cable for programming ICOM and Alinco radios and is written by Direct Dirt guest writer Mitch Matteau N0DIM. Several types of ICOM and Alinco radios are programmed from PCs with a USB serial interface cable kit manufactured by ICOM and sold under the part number OPC-478U. Memory channels on most modern radios can be programmed with PC to radio interface cables.
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