Baofeng UV-5R

[Matt285]

I'm sure many of you have heard about this HT transceiver, however I wanted to post since I just purchased One. A coworker of mine who is a tech lic bought One first and brought it in to let me play with it. After my short trial with it I was very thrown off by the aggravating programming. having programmed many Yaesu and icom Ht's I found it quite annoying. After getting the Chrip programming software along with a unit I found it is a joy to use. $20.00 on Amazon I now have an HT capable of running 2m/440 along with FRS/GMRS, Marine, Weather rx and general FM. Even if your not a licensed operator I would highly suggest purchasing One. You cannot go wrong for the cost and it works great. GET THE PROGRAMMING CORD AND SOFTWARE (Free download)  Best $20.00 dollars ive spent in a long time. 

[Rob.]

Once you get used to the manual programming it isn't too bad. Most of the Chinese radios program the same way. Chirp does make things easier. While they aren't as sensitive or able to avoid intermod as well as a Yaesu, Icom, Kenwood, or Alinco, they are definitely worth the money for what they do. If you don't live in a high RF environment it will do fine. Do a side by side comparisions between the big name manufacturers and the Chinese radios and you will usually hear the difference. But at 10x the price you should.

I have quite a few of these for various purposes and never regretted purchasing them. Some of the older ones had some spurious issues but I believe that the newer ones have remedied most of that problem.

[Matt285]

Yup. I have a Yaesu HT and there is a difference, but like you said there is a big difference in price and its not a night and day difference. Im still learning my away around the menu.

[Rob.]

This site has a lot of helpful information to help people navigate through the programming maze:

http://miklor.com/

[Josh]

For the price of one KW TH-F6A coulda got a dozen barfing ht's and skipped the power switch and tnc connector issues altogether.

[R4002]

I have about two dozen UV-5Rs laying around (all with the 3800mah battery pack) and they're great because you can use them on the FRS/GMRS, MURS and ham frequencies all in one radio.  I spent two weeks driving around Germany, France, Switzerland and Austria (two cars, on the Autobahn, having HTs is quite helpful).  They do the weird 6.25 kHz offset and 2.5 kHz channel steps which allowed me to program them up on the PMR446 frequencies (Europe's version of FRS).  With CTCSS and not-using-PMR446-channel-1 we had zero issues with interference and the 3800mah battery packs never needed to be charged.  The radios were on low power setting the whole time but there was a lot of car-to-car chatter. 

I currently use a UV-5R as the transmit/receive radio for a solar powered MURS repeater I have installed in a secret location that's super secret.  It works great.  They are Chinese rigs so I imagine quality control isn't as good as it is with the Japanese rigs but for the price...60 bucks for a pair (with the high capacity batteries) its hard to believe they're trying to be as good as a $200 Yaesu/Icom/Kenwood. 

I use my UV-5Rs all the time.  Apparently they're quite popular with Ukrainian militia as well.