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USB-1 Drivers

The USB-1 cable is used to connect the following Uniden scanners to a PC using the PC's USB port.

Before using the cable, or if you have problems connecting to the scanner, you should check to be sure you have installed the latest drivers for the cable.

The USB-1 cable uses the Prolific PL2303 chipset.

Download the PC drivers by clicking PL2303_Prolific_DriverInstaller_v1.6.0.zip.

Drivers for other operating systems might be available in the support section at: http://www.prolific.com.tw

IMPORTANT: The drivers linked above will only work with cables that use the Prolific PL2303 chipset, like the USB-1 cable. If you purchased a 3rd-party USB-to-Serial adapter cable, then you must use the drivers appropriate to that cable. The other major chipset used in USB-to-Serial adapters is made by FTDI. Uniden cannot support 3rd-party cables, but you can check FTDI's website for current drivers if you are using a cable that uses their chipset.

Follow any instructions provided by Prolific for installing the drivers. After you install the drivers, when you plug in the USB-1 cable, it should appear as a COM port. To connect to the scanner, you should set the software you are using to the same COM port as assigned to the USB-1 cable. Note that each USB port on your PC typically will be assigned a different COM port by the Prolific driver, so if you unplug the USB-1 cable then plug it into a different port, you'll need to update the software's setting in order to reestablish a connectiion to the scanner.

Prolific provides drivers for the following operating systems:

Note that, while driver support is provided for multiple operating systems the application you are running to connect to the scanner must also support running under the desired operating system in order for it to work. At this time, we are not aware of any scanner programming or control software available for Apple computers.

Troubleshooting Tips

A few people have reported issues installing the drivers on Windows 7 64-bit systems. We have verified that the published drivers do work. If you have a problem with the installation, the below steps have resolved the issue in at least one verified case. Note that these same steps might also work to resolve issues with other versions of Windows. We suspect that the problem is caused by an unsupported or outdated driver in the system.

  1. Plug in the cable, then open up device manager, right-click on the device that has the error and click "Uninstall". Once that finishes, unplug the cable.
  2. Go to Uninstall Programs and uninstall "PL-2303 USB-to-Serial" if it exists. You might want to sort by publisher and see if there are any old Prolific drivers on the system...if so, uninstall them, too. Hopefully this will get you back to a clean state vis-a-vis the cable and its drivers.
  3. Follow the link provided above to go to Prolific's site and download the latest driver (takes about 20 seconds) and unzip it to a directory.
  4. The assumption is that you are administrator on your PC, but to be sure right click on the installer file and "Run as Administrator." The install takes less than 20 seconds.
  5. Plug in the cable. It should be recognized and install as a COM port (this takes about 30 seconds the first time you plug the cable into a port).

IMPORTANT WINDOWS 8 INFORMATION

The current Prolific Driver, as delivered through their web site and through Windows Update for Windows 8, will not work with older USB-1 cables that use the PL2303HXA chipset. To use these drivers you must have a current USB-1 cable that uses the PL2303HXD chipset. You can still use the older cable under Windows 8, however, you must use "legacy" drivers. We are in the process of checking the 1.6.0 installer for compatibility, but have confirmation that the 1.5.0 installer includes drivers that will work with the older cables. You can download those installers here: PL2303_Prolific_DriverInstaller_v1.5.0.zip

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Compressed Zip archivezip PL2303_Prolific_DriverInstaller_v1.5.0.zip manage 3072.5 K 12 Nov 2012 - 22:50 UnknownUser