Why is my XBee PRO S3B giving junk data in XCTU, even after recovery was used?

Question

I recently bought a pair of XBee PRO S3B modules (900Mhz, 9600 baud) and a Sparkfun Xbee dongle (USB). When I run XCTU, it finds the module easily enough, and it's the correct module type, but when I load the settings into XCTU, they're mostly junk data (out of range values, etc.) - even after I reset everything to factory settings and wrote the data out, when I read it back in it's all junk again. I tried using the recovery feature to reload the firmware but the same thing keeps happening. This has happened for both modules I purchased. Did I buy faulty modules? They were bought on Amazon.com - do I need to buy from another source to avoid getting bad modules? Or am I missing something? I'm using the Mac OS X version of XCTU. Please help!

Answer 1

No, they are not faulty modules. What you need to do is first optimize the USB ports for low data rate devices as described at http://knowledge.digi.com/articles/Knowledge_Base_Article/Optimizing-USB-to-serial-port-settings/?q=optimizing+usb+drivers&l=en_US&fs=Search&pn=1.

Next, if you are using the XSC version of the firmware, you will need to remove one of the LED's from the Explorer board. (Talk to Spark Fun about it).