I wish I had done even a little research before pulling the trigger on my purchase of not one but three inexpensive Baofeng dual band handheld transceivers.
I mean, I know it’s my own fault, I spend a lot of time writing reviews on my amazon purchases, you might think I would slow down and take a few minutes to read a few.
However, that’s not how it went down.
The first time I saw a mention of Baofeng on Reddit, I jumped on Amazon and saw the Baofeng UV-5R listed for $23 and change. I did a double take and searched again. Sure enough, the radio actually cost less than $25 shipped.
Of course, I added to cart and ordered one.
Then I saw what appeared to be an even better model, the BF-F8HP. The F8HP is listed as an 8 watt (high power) handheld. I added to cart.
The F8HP arrived first, there was a 5 day delay on the UV-5R, and I quickly unboxed and set the radio up. It had some frequencies pre-programmed (which I found odd) and I heard some traffic on a couple of them.
At this point, I still didn’t have my license and I was actively studying for the exam. I scoured the two reddit ham radio subs and read about the UV-5R radios. Not everything was positive; in fact, a lot of it was negative.
Many people flat out hate the radios and actively discourage their purchase for a number of reasons not the least of which is that they are ‘cheap Chinese garbage.’
I found this criticism a little harsh and maybe even low key racist. (I couldn’t really tell from the tone of the posts so I let it slide for the time being).
Other complaints included the fact that the radios exceeded the spurious emissions standards of the FCC and then there is the fact that the radios can transmit on FRS and GMRS frequencies with significantly higher power than what is legally allowed on these frequencies.
Having already purchased the radios, I charged ahead and educated myself on their functionality and programming.
I watched a couple youtube videos and that helped with the programming and selecting the ‘best’ settings for amateur radio use.
Next, I ordered the programming cable – a special USB cable containing a chip that converts USB to serial communications. Great.
And then, I needed ‘better’ whip antenna so I ordered one of those, too.
Shortly thereafter, I passed my license exam and became KF0BVG.
I used a program called CHIRP to configure the radios channel memories. CHIRP can query the ‘repeater book’ and download all the nearby repeaters.
Programming a radio with CHIRP is fairly easy, I’d actually experienced radio programming when I worked for the county a couple years earlier.
You plug the USB cable into the computer and the other end goes into the radio speaker/mic ports. Launch chirp, turn the radio on and download an ‘image’ from the radio. This you save for later incase you have to roll back your programming chages.
Then I did a repeater book dump for all repeaters within 25 miles.
Easy enough.
Now, upload to radio.
The program presented an error (that I did not capture) but uploaded a number of repeaters on 2m and 70cm. It did skip some that were digital (as the Baofeng radios are analog devices).
Great! I started scanning the repeaters. And heard absolutely nothing for several days.
I’m in the western part of the county, not close to any of the repeaters (I presumed) so I put an external UHF/VHF antenna and ran the coax into my makeshift garage shack. I sat near the rig and watched it scan endlessly, only stopping on a couple channels that seemed to be filled with static. This was annoying but I dealt with it.
Monday night rolls around and I turned to the local club repeater to listen to their net. 8 PM comes and goes and I hear dead air.
I picked up the BF-F8HP and pressed the menu key to check my settings and I suddenly heard a voice. I kept hearing this until the radio left the menu mode. Silence again.
Press menu – more voices – radio leaves menu mode: no voices.
The same behavior could be repeated by pressing the ‘monitor’ button.
This was confusing. The radio seemed to be programmed correctly, but incoming audio was not coming through.
I tried resetting the rig and reprogramming with only 1 channel loaded – the repeater I was trying to hear on Monday.
This still didn’t work.
I dialed the repeater input frequency in ‘frequency (VFO) mode’ and I could hear people talking without going into monitor or menu. I could also set the repeater output frequency in ‘VFO’ mode and hear the output.
Once I switched to Channel mode the radio fell silent.
I requested a replacement through Amazon and, at some point, I saw they also had a Baofeng Triband radio (2m, 1.25cm, and 70cm) for about $40. So, of course, I ordered that one, too.
I also programmed both the UV-5R and the Triband with the same repeater list and, lo and behold, all three have the same behavior.
I assume it’s something coming over from the repeater book, some weird setting that is turning off or blocking the receive signal unless I hit the menu or monitor button on the radio.
The replacement BF-F8HP arrived and I tried a manual config for the repeater – the only problem is, the radio will not save some settings using the manual programming method. For example, it doesn’t save the T-CTCS value regardless of the setting selected.
I took the radio to a local ham, a guy who has a handful of older Baofeng radios and a variety of other handhelds.
He exported the config off of one of his radios and we used the repeater settings from his radio on my radio.
During testing, he was transmitting and getting out on the repeater but we could never hear my radio ‘open up’ on recieve.
One of his HT and another brand HT I ended up buying both received the repeater output just fine, but not the Baofeng.
The configuration is perfect, there are no nonstandard settings selected. It absolutely will not output receive audio on channel mode.
And this same behavior follows all 3 models of Baofeng radio. Either something bricked the radios during the first upload of the repeater directory (all 3 gave the same error and I was too stupid to capture the error) or the radios are simply hot garbage.
I have zero use for this radios right now and have no idea how to fix them.
I see other people online talking about the same problem with the same model radios (UV-5R and the BF-B8HP) and not a single solution can be found.
Another guy posted a bug on the CHIRP website, no fix reported yet.