The Woodward discovery! |
Back to Larry's Scanner cable deal.
New NEWS: 9/12/02 It's all worked out! We are manufacturing both types of cables now so you no longer need any adaptors! Our PCL35M has the 3.5mm mono plug for the Pro-92,3,etc.. and our PCL35S has a 3.5mm stereo plug that works with the Icom IC-R3 and other Icom radios.
(received 06/21/2002 12PM) Hi Larry, I just got off the phone with you and I am glad to share this news with you. I finally got your cable to work with my Icom IC-R3. Save a seat for my on the Pfranc.com Purple jet. Anyways the short and sweet of it is that Icom uses the ring of the mini (3.5mm) stereo phono plug connector for data in and out. They use the tip for audio to mono head phones. All you need to do is connect both transmit and receive to the ring of a mini-stereo male connector and you'll be all set. Here is how I did it. Short version: Ingredients for Larry's cable to an Icom IC-R3 that works. 1 - Purple Computing cable from Pfranc.com 1 - female sub-mini stereo to male mini-stereo adapter 1 - female mini-stereo to male mini-mono adapter ------- At this point you have a Radio Shack Pro-92 Cable ---------- 1 - Made by Tim - female mini-mono to a male mini-stereo connector with the tip of the mono connected to only the ring of the stereo connector. ---------Now you have an Icom IC-R3 compatible cable ---------------- All you need to do now is verify that RTS=Low and go!!!!!! Long Version - also known as the Engineers pat on the back version. I spent a little bit of time getting this to work I am proud to say. A couple nights, a soldering iron, and two trips to Radio Shack and I had a cable that works for both my Pro-92 and IC-R3 scanners. I origionally bought your cable to work with a radio shack Pro-92 scanner. I needed to purchase a "female sub-mini stereo to male mini-stereo adapter" and a "female mini-stereo to male mini-mono" adapter. This worked like a charm for the Pro-92! To make the Icom IC-R3 work I needed to make a cable to go down to the ring of a male mini-stereo connector. I found a female mini-mono solder connector and then took a mini-stereo cable and cut it up so that I had the male mini-stereo connector still on it. I then ohmed out the cable and found the wire to the ring and soldered it to the tip connection on the female mini-mono solder connector. Obviously I solder the ground of the mini-stereo to the ground lug of the mini-mono. Are you still with me? Now I had both transmit and receive on the ring of the male mini-stereo connector that I could plug into the Icom IC-R3. Unfortunately that wasn't the end because the software I had would put the radio into clone mode but would never read the data into the PC. I figured all I had left to play with was the RTS and DTR levels. I found a setting in the softwares .ini file for RTS=1. I figured it was worth a try so I changed it to RTS=0 and saved the file. I wasn't really expecting much, but was I ever surprised when hit the upload scanner to PC and the softwares progess indicator started turning blue toward 100 percent. It worked like a charm boy was I excited! I am still waiting for my license key for the software so that I can verify that the cable will write to the radio. I believe that it is already talking to the scanner as it set it to clone mode. I will send you another email this weekend so that you can be 100 percent sure. I really enjoy this sort of stuff and if there is anything thing that I can do in the future to help I hope you would consider me. Sincerely, Tim Woodward Westford Massachusetts - Your future East Coast engineer! tim@bizint.com