Programming the Baofeng BF-888S.

I’ve recently acquired a couple of Baofeng BF-888S walkie-talkies for an other-end-of-the field sort of task. They’re only short-range, low-power things, and very cheap, but a slight problem is that they come pre-programmed with a weird collection of frequencies that it’s not advisable to use in Europe. (And probably North America, either!)

Sometimes they’re advertised as being 5 watts, but that’s a bit wishful thinking. I think the power was measured but the same people who do MPG for cars, or the savings when you switch utility suppliers. The picture in the ad also shows the battery chargers with US style mains plugs, but mine came with USB plugs.

There’s no keypad or display on these, so I got a programming cable from the usual online bazzar.

It’s really only a USB to serial adapter with connectors for the radio at the other end, and appears to use a Prolific pl2303 chip.

In theory, you could make your own if your computer has a serial port.

I wanted to program them to use the standard PMR446 channels.

There’s 2 ways of doing this. The Linux way, or the Windows way.

Both have their little foibles.

(There’s probably a Mac way as well, but I know nothing of those things.)

Linux.

Just plug the cable into a USB port.

To see what it’s called, run dmesg. Mine came out as ttyUSB0.

Now go to your distro’s package manager and download chirp and run it.

Then turn on the radio and plug it into the cable. (The other way round doesn’t seem to work.)

First off, click Radio/download from Radio.

A window pops up where you can select the port (e.g. /dev/tty/ttyUSB0), Vendor (Baofeng), and Model (BF-888).

Click OK and it reads the current radio settings.

So you can recover if it all goes wrong, click file/save and call the file something like “original”.

I edited the channels to be the following PMR446 frequencies:-

Chan. Frequency.

1 446.00625
2 446.01875
3 446.03125
4 446.04375
5 446.05625
6 446.06875
7 446.08125
8 446.09375

As this is a 16 channel radio, I also set channels 9 to 16 to be the same 8 frequencies.

Save this configuration as something like “pmr446”.

Then click Radio/Upload to Radio.

When it’s done, close chirp, switch the radio off and unplug it, and you’re good to go.

You can then plug in another radio, click file/open/pmr446 and upload it to be the same.

Windows.

This time, there is a choice of 2 programs.

We have chirp, which is the same as the Linux version, and one called 888S, which you can download and install from the Baofeng web site. This one has more settings you can mess with.

Don’t forget to change the Voice Annunciation from Chinese to English.

To find the port, you’ll have to look in “Device Managment” for the serial adapter. Mine came out to be COM3. Then in 888S, choose Setting/Communication Port/COM3. The active one should be the only one not greyed out.

However…

There is a problem with the Prolific pl2302 chip driver. Prolific say it’s supposed to not work with fake prolific chips, only genuine ones, but I’ve never seen one that works. I always get a yellow triangle.

In Windows 10, the answer is to roll the driver back to the Vista version. 3.2.0.0

It may come with the cable, if you are lucky enough to get a cd with it, otherwise download a program that will install version 3.2.0.0 (probably from the pyramidtimesystems.com website).

You can then go to device manager/select the com port with the yellow triangle/update driver/Let me pick from a list… and choose 3.2.0.0 and reboot.

Be aware, any windows update will reset this back to the latest MS version, and you may need to do this again.

After all that, I’ll probably never have to do that again. Oh well…