Sorry for the late response — I am unable to reproduce this issue (I just went through the steps on a clean Windows box and “pod — version” returns 1.8.4 for me, which is the same version as you’re running.

However, the UTF-8 error leads me to think it might be a Ruby installation issue. In the instructions, it said “When installing Ruby, accept the defaults but make sure “Use UTF-8 as default external encoding” is selected.” It might be worth it to review that to see if that’s what’s missing.