I bought this radio from Amazon a few days ago. Have programmed a half dozen repeaters and simplex stations (comes with 2M, 1.25M, and 70cm call channels in memories 1-3) thru its keyboard.
Happy to discuss and review as I use more of its features… Here is what I’ve discovered so far – I have not yet tried the GPS…
The bad news…
- This is supposed to be an 8 Watt radio… It is not… Max power (all measured with a nanoSA ultra directly connected thru 80dB attenuation) on 2M is 6.1 watts. On 70cm is 5.1 watts, and 1.25M about 5.2 watts.
- The full color screen is lovely but there is no brightness control. In bright sun it is unreadable!
The good news…
- The internal software is a great improvement over the older Baofeng. There are 2 menus, a generic menu for overall radio functions and a sub menu for functions more specific to individual stations.
- Repeaters are straight forward to program and can be done through either menu (see below for station name quirk). In the generic menu (in VFO) you enter frequency, offset, and direction, CTCSS (or DCS etc) and when you store settings in memory it works.
- You can program repeaters (or simplex) from either VFO or channel mode. In channel mode you enter receive and transmit frequencies directly.
- You can permanently change stored channel parameters from channel mode without having to delete the channel and rebuild it from scratch.
- 1000 channels can be stored divided into 10 zones.
- Very good flexible scanner features including lock out and inclusion by individual channel or zone.
Note: you can enter channel names (12 characters allowed) using the channel specific menu but beware… If you program a new channel in channel mode you must enter the channel name last, AFTER you have stored the channel in a memory slot. If you create a name before storing you have just changed the name (but not other settings) of whatever channel you happen to be on when you started…
That is what I’ve learned so far…
Matthew
KD6KVH