I came across a GR1225 Motorola repeater. We had a use for it, but no one knew what it was set up for.
I no longer own a windows XP or older computer… my last one up and died 2 moves ago…. While I had hyper-V running with XP, it wouldn’t talk to my USB to serial adaptors. The concept of a pipe just doesn’t work well without external tools, and this wasn’t worth a purchase.
Through a little searching, I found that VMware (which I had tried YEARS before with little success) apparently had better solutions. They also have a much better method of moving files. While hyper-v requires making virtual disks and network stuff that just didn’t work well, VMware allows direct drag and drop from the host to the VM. I had tried to use VMware before, and had not had any success.
I grabbed prolific xp drivers for my cable (thank you keysight for hosting them), and a copy of ver 4 of the 1225 software that was with the radio I had…
First I installed the prolific driver, then the Motorola software. That went smoothly, as expected. This was just getting software to run.
When I plugged my cable in to the host machine, VMware asks automatically if I want it on the host or the virtual machine!
One word of caution- Motorola expects the com port to be com1, so that needs to be manually reconfigured.
Once I did that, I was greeted with a working status bar for the read!
It’s not a major breakthrough or anything that I’m sure others haven’t gotten running before, but it is a method to program older stuff using newer operating systems…
Now, obviously, this is all on windows. I tried Mac parallels, but it didn’t like windows XP, as it wasn’t an ARM version. Bummer. Maybe crossover? Eh. I got something that works, why mess with it?