Just wanted to document my experience on sourcing a reliable EQ Direct cable for anyone who has balked at the idea of paying $72 + postage for a serial cable from Bintel. Now If your anything like me, the first thing you did was check ebay and aliexpress. Ebay has several dodgy looking cables but I chose
this one from Aliexpress. Unfortunately much to my chagrin while it does technically work, the fake FTDI chip causes constant comm errors in eqmod. I ended up buying a 232R evaluation board from
RS and replaced the usb port on the cable and now I don't get a single error. If you want my advice start with a real FTDI Chip, 5 V TTL USB to UART Cable from a local supplier and solder a db9 connector on it.