USB to Serial for Mac OS X
The driver for the cable can be downloaded from the Prolific website, however we have found an open source driver, which does the job and more over gives some better performance. We recommend you download the open source driver.
After you have installed the driver, connect your cable to any of your free USB ports. Mac OS X will automatically create a serial device, which can be found in /dev. Start a terminal session and list all available serial (or tty) devices available. Type the following:
ls -l /dev/tty*
Find the entry that is referring to your cable. Typically this should look similar to:
/dev/tty.PL2303-0002600D
Now that we have identified our new serial device, we can start connecting to a radio. Most people will use a Terminal Emulator, but as most of these programs were built pre-Leopard, you may find some difficulties running them on new(er) Mac hardware. We simply use the built-in screen program on Mac OS. So in the same terminal window, simply type:
screen /dev/tty.PL2303-0002600D 57600
You can obviously change the baud rate or any other options to what you need to connect to your specific device. Ten-Tec Omni-VII uses a baud rate of 57600. We did notice that every time you connect and re-connect the cable’s tty device id changes.
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