OK, you do enough digging and you find the answers you were looking for. It turns out the the cable itself is just a plain old 25ft cable. However, the cable plugs into a "dongle". The dongle then plugs into the usb port. The dongle has a driver in it that allows the software to download the info from the chronograph. So the answer is, YES you have to purchase their $50 set up to use it on your computer.