Make sure the serial port you are using is not used for anything else. If you own a Palm Pilot/PDA, it could be the device driver for it is still running, even when not connected. That would cause problems like you describe. If so, you will have to shut down that kind of program until you get a good read from the radio.
If the read encounters problems, pushing the Up/down arrows on the radio will not "work". If the radio isn't saying "SENDING", then there is something ELSE wrong, and doing that will not solve the problem.\
Also
Go to the "Select Radio" menu
If the problems do not go away, maybe you should install the software on a different computer, at least to get it to work to the point where you can save the file you want to read from the radio. Even taking it to a friend's computer and saving the file "there" would be better. Then you can take back the radio, get a new one and probably reprogram "it" with no problems.
Mr. Springer,
I have a Radio Shack Pro-97 and the Radio Shack 20-289 cable.
Originally I had gotten the USB Radio Shack cable and then it didn t work so I looked it up on your site and went and got the 20-289 cable.
Here is the problem:
I bought a new Pro-97 in late December and have spent hours programming it for my home area as well as all surrounding counties, Texas DPS and an area in central Texas where we spend a lot of time. At times when I unplugged from electricity the scanner would not run on the batteries. Radio Shack tested several things and determined that it was the plug on the scanner. Instead of repairing it they are replacing it, but I don t want to spend hours programming the new one with frequencies, talk groups and text tags so I thought I would back up the old data, take the old one back and get the new one and then load it with the information I backed up into your program.
Yesterday I tried the backup procedure several times and it would start running and then stop and stay error. If I just pushed the arrow up and 1 then it would start again. Eventually after doing that multiple times it got all the way to 100% and acted like it was processing the data but it never actually would appear on the screen.
I read the web stuff over and over and tried various things but never got it to work so I am apparently just not smart enough to run the program correctly.