Yes, I would upgrade from the JDM serial programmer to this one recently. Mostly because i thought it will work better and also when it was equipped with the ZIF socket, I could program more types of controllers. I was wrong though. I havent got any reliability out of it. It sometimes work but most often not. I have tried several softwares without success. I have tried different settings on the paralellport on the dedicated machine (p3 500 win98), also without success. Maybe the small transistors I choosed is on the edge for this construction. I have two different types of BC556 PNP's and some of them have totally different Hfe then the other. One of the five of them fails to open up on signal. Strange but not all uncomon when you work with transistors, I have learned. I think I don't want to put more time in this project because my new Serial Pro programmer with it's own firmware seems to work great and will therefoe be my number one programmer.
I got the schematic and layout to this "clone" from an Italian site. The schematic is largely the same floating around in somewhat different flavours on the Internet.
PIC Start Index