I bought a couple of Baofeng UV-9R radios with a computer communication cable, but I could not find instructions on how to program the radios from a computer. It took me some time to figure it out, and here is a summary. There are two ways to connect to the radio.

• Programming With Chirp

CHIRP

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• Step by step tutorial of how to find and download CHIRP software for programming HAM radios.
• LATEST CHIRP SOFTWARE RELEASE HERE.
• (chirp-unified-daily-yyyymmdd.app.zip) for those running CHIRP on an Apple Mac computer. It is now the 'recommended' choice for those using CHIRP on MacOS. The original (now called the MacOS Legacy Application) build is still available, but can only be run on MacOS versions prior to Catalina that still support 32-bit applications.

CHIRP is easy: once you’ve figured out the COM port where the radio is listening, select UV-82WP as the radio model, and it should work.

Chirp provides a number of related tools for analyzing and comparing bioacoustic recordings. It can operate on recordings stored in standard wave files, with the option of restricting analyses to specific spectrotemporal regions of the recording.

WP970I

This software can be downloaded from Baofeng: go to http://www.baofengradio.com/ and select Download -> Programming Software. I downloaded the file named “WP970I Setup”, mainly because it specified Chinese/English as language. There were also files named WP970I_CPS, WP970Setup; I am not sure in which ways they are different from the one I downloaded.

After installation, it launches with all-Chinese interface, which on my Windows installation resulted in question marks for all menu names and menu items. Do not worry – there is English interface available, to switch to it, click on the second-last menu and select English from the drop-down. Then select Program -> Read from radio and you should be able to extract data from your device.

My main interest was to program the GMRS channels into the radio to be used in channel mode, and in CHIRP this is easy to do by selecting Radio -> Import from stock config -> US FRS and GMRS Channels and then uploading to the radio.

Development of CHIRP is an all-volunteer effort and is offered as open-source software, free of charge. If you like CHIRP, please consider contributing a small donation to help support the costs of development and hardware:

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CHIRP is distributed as a series of automatically-generated builds. Any time we make a change to CHIRP, a build is created for it the next day. Thus, CHIRP is versioned by the date on which it was created, which makes it easy to determine if you have an older build. We don't put experimental things into CHIRP before they are ready, except where specifically called out with a warning. Thus, you do not need to worry about finding a stable version to run. You should always be on the latest build available.

Upgrading: You do need to uninstall an existing version of CHIRP before installing a newer one. Just install the new one and it will replace the existing copy!

You can find a complete test report of the current build here and a matrix of supported models and features here

Windows Users¶

• CHIRP runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10. Older versions of Windows are not supported
• Most users will want to download the installer.exe file, which installs CHIRP like a normal application
• The win32.zip file is for advanced users wishing to run CHIRP without installing

MacOS Users¶

• OS X support is limited to Intel architecture. PowerPC is not supported.
• Chirp.app is unsigned. With default security settings, you will need a special procedure to run it: Application Security in 10.9.

Homebrew users can install Chirp without the KK7DS runtime by running brew install tdsmith/ham/chirp and then running chirp from the terminal.
However, running CHIRP using Homebrew is obsolete. MacOS Unified Application build is now the recommended way.

More useful tidbits can be found at MacOS Tips.

Linux Users¶

Most Linux users will want the flatpak executable, which has the entire runtime integrated and should 'just work.' If you are running an old or weird distro and want the source distribution, grab the tarball from the above link.

Translators and Developers¶

There is extensive documentation about the development and contribution process located at http://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/Developers

Programming With Chirp

You can access older versions of chirp here: