Eyespy link walkie talkies review12/30/2023 I studied using the ARRL handbook and focused on the exam pool. Getting the first level license - sufficient, for many purposes - will take you about a day. Hank wrote: For those in the US curious about what it takes to become ham operators, look nearby: II to see if it’s any better and will write up a review soon. I won’t be rewarding Baofeng for its sly business model, so I’ll be returning this unit. Overall thoughts: I’ve tried out the UV-5R for a week before the BF-F8HP arrived, but I was a little disappointed by the unpolished firmware and the lackluster set of improvements. The UV-5R retails for $29.15.ĭoes it offer twice the performance over the 5R? No, having two UV-5Rs would be more useful. Gets the job done well and responds quickly too. The antenna is a nice upgrade over the UV-5R as well as the power. Well rounded functionality, but not much improvement over the UV-5R, except the boosted power. Twice the price of an UV-5R, not really worth it. Did I mention that the firmware can’t be upgraded? Mushy buttons (Feels like a mushy flashlight switch with a gap of air between the rubber tailcap and the switch) (Although other factors, such as antenna ( SWR) quality and location, are more important) On the 5R, I didn’t notice a difference between a level 1 (almost open) and a 9 (only strong signals should come through). The squelch setting actually changes the signal levels threshold levels. I could scroll through the items very quickly, where as the 5R had a delay (100ms) after I pressed the up/down button so that fast scrolling was not possible.ģ. However, the F8HP seems to pick up conversations right away.Ģ. On the 5R, I would miss about half a second of each transmission, and if the transmission is only a word long (ok, copy, etc), I would miss it entirely. The Rx side of the radio switches on much quickly than the 5R. Three improvements I’ve noticed while comparing the F8HP to the UV-5R:ġ. I don’t trust the stock charger so I think I’ll use a hobby charger to charge the 2S li-ion battery pack. Since the battery pack seems to be protected, having a shoddy charger wouldn’t be too bad for the battery, but nevertheless is expected from a cheap budget radio. Here’s a photo of the internals of the charger: Hint: The batteries are designed to be interchangeable. Baofeng is taking advantage of these bugs rather than focusing on the hardware… because it’s cheaper!Īs a flashaholic, I naturally measured the voltages of the battery and realized that the polarity identifications were swapped.į8HP on the left, UV-5R on the right. The UV-5R itself has multiple of cosmetic variants (UV-5RA, 5RB, 5B V2+, 5Re, 5RAX+, 5R Plus, etc.), newer models having newer firmware with bug fixes. That way, Baofeng doesn’t have to try hard to make radical hardware improvements to incorporate into new products. Again, this a marketing ploy forcing customers to purchase new radios even for a firmware update. So although we could use PC software such as CHIRP to interface with the radio and program Rx/Tx frequencies, we couldn’t update the firmware. Unfortunately, Baofeng radios’ firmware can’t be upgraded (marketing ploy), so there was no way to fix this bug via an update. One thing I didn’t like about that was I couldn’t quickly go back and forth, as the VHF/UHF frequencies are remembered when I switch them on the 5R at a click of a button. The only way I could change the frequency was to manually type it in. The UV-5R had a band button on the right that worked just fine and the switching from the menu worked as expected. However, the menu actually didn’t change the frequencies they stayed the same. Since the F8HP lacked a band button that would allow me to swap UHF and VHF channels, I had to go to the menu (#33) to switch modes. The HP stands for high power, and is rated for 8W transmit, although others have measured it as around 7W VHF and slightly lower for UHF. I think I liked the design of the F8HP slightly more, although the 5R wasn’t bad. The F8HP was more rectangular with well defined edges. The F8HP is on the left, the UV-5R on the right.īoth were shaped quite similarly, although the 5R had a rounder aesthetics to it. It was good to see that Amazon was properly labeling boxes with li-ion batteries and taking precautionary measures. The Amazon box it came in had a lithium-ion battery warning sticker, saying that it should be handled with care. When the license arrived, I ordered a Baofeng BF-F8HP handheld transceiver from Amazon.Īt the same time, I borrowed the famous Baofeng UV-5R from the Radio Club so I had a well known benchmark to compare it with. Since the license test is sampled from a question pool, it wasn’t too hard to study for. A couple of weeks ago I got my HAM radio license.
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