I purchased a few Baofeng UV82 radios to play around with.
I am using the chirp 0.4.1 software (see http://chirp.danplanet.com) to program the radios, and that proved sometimes elusive. I am using a Prolific-based USB programming cable I got from AliExpress.
I installed a Prolific driver for Mac OS X which I downloaded from http://www.miklor.com/COM/UV_Drivers.php and sometimes things would work, sometimes not.
A possibly important note: my Mac is currently running with a boot flag that allows improperly signed extensions to load on OS X 10.10. I needed to execute the command line
sudo nvram boot-args="kext-dev-mode=1"
and then reboot in order to allow my USB-to-HDMI adapters to work.
This setting might or might not affect the loading of the Prolific drivers – so if the procedure below does not work, try setting the ‘kext-dev-mode’ boot flag, reboot, then try again.
Often the chirp software would refuse to upload or download with a ‘Radio did not respond’ error message.
I think I’ve found a way to make it work for me:
1) Quit chirp if running.
2) Disconnect the programming cable. Turn radio off.
3) Start a Terminal session and navigate to /System/Library/Extensions
4) Unload the driver:
sudo kextunload ./osx-pl2303.kext
5) Start chirp
6) Connect the programming cable to the radio (but not to the computer). Turn the radio on.
7) Connect the USB of the programming cable to the computer
8) Reload the driver
sudo kextload ./osx-pl2303.kext
9) In chirp, now upload or download
By no means do I want to imply this is the only proper sequence. Maybe some of the steps above are unnecessary, or can be executed in a different sequence. I’ve not experimented that much. But this is what seems to work for me. Hopefully it helps someone else struggling with the same issues!