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!
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).