Quote:
Originally Posted by davet753
I have two Baofengs (a UV5R and a BF-F8HP), and both are set to wide band. The 8 watt version has great audio, the UV5R was very low when I got it, and there is no mic gain adjustment. The hole on the case for the UV5R microphone is very tiny, and you can improve the transmitted audio by making the hole larger.
The Baofeng HT's lack a lot of features, the design of the menu system sucks, and the display is outdated. Despite that, for $35 they are one heck of a good deal. They work well, and accessories are super low priced compared to the competition.
Programming is a royal PIA, but you can download CHIRP for free and make it much less stressful. Just be sure before you program it to use the software to read the factory parameters and save them to a file on your computer.....that way you can go back to the factory settings as the menu option to do a "factory reset" doesn't really reset everything.
I also recommend going on amazon and purchasing some accessories. They have an external mic/speaker that you can get for less than $10, and the Nagoya NA771 whip antenna ($15) will beat the daylights out of the factory rubber duck. If you want to use a base antenna, beware the SMA adapter you need is exactly opposite the standard one used by everybody else.
For the money, you can't beat the Baofengs.
David KM4NYI
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The Baofeng UV-5R HT arrived here at my apartment this afternoon via USPS. The radio works, but as you said, programming it takes a lot of patience. The owner's manual is very poorly translated from Chinese, so I would suggest downloading the same manual as a .pdf file. The latter version was annotated by a ham in Indiana and is much easier to read than the original.
I placed an order for the Nagoya NA-771 dual-band whip antenna on Amazon.com just before writing this post. I'm sure this antenna will work much better for me, since I am having problems getting into the local repeater (about ten miles away in the next town south of here) with my Icom IC-T22A; the UV-5R just doesn't make it at all with the stock rubber duck. The IC-T22A only puts out 1.5 watts maximum power, whereas the Baofeng UV-5R has two power settings: 1 and five watts. With the Nagoya whip and running 5 watts, I should be able to access the local machine with few if any problems; if one watt won't do it, five watts probably will. I used to be able to get into the repeater just fine with 1.5 watts with my Icom HT, but something must have changed somewhere between the repeater and my apartment because now, accessing the machine is hit-or-miss, and it only works in one or two places in the apartment.
One of the few things I don't care for with the UV-5R is the antenna connector. It isn't the BNC connector one would expect to find on an HT, but it is a special type of threaded connector that no other HT manufacturer uses. This means I cannot use the telescoping 3/8-wave whip I used with my Icom HT, but must use the matching whip that was made to work with Baofeng HTs. If you want to use a BNC-equipped rubber duck or an external base-station 2-meter antenna with a UV-5R (or any other Baofeng HT), you must get the special adapter.
I am downright surprised that Baofeng did not include this adapter with the UV-5R HT. It wouldn't have added that much more to the price, and it certainly would make things easier for hams with standard BNC-equipped antennas if and/or when they find out the rubber duck included with the radio doesn't work very well. Rubber duck antennas, which are a very poor match from an SWR standpoint for the output of any HT, are good for use in areas very close to local repeaters, but not if you are any distance from them. I am about ten miles or so from the nearest repeater, so I need to use an antenna with some gain, such as a telescoping 3/8-wave whip, to put any kind of decent signal into that machine from this distance. Hopefully the Nagoya whip, used with my UV-5R, will solve the problem. My next post will document the results of my tests of that antenna; as I said, I am fully expecting to put a decent signal into the local repeater with it and 5 watts input.