hi guys, new guy alert !, ok so just recently got into this hobby, and loving it !, i have a uniden scanner to listen to bits and bobs but am looking at the Baofeng UV-5R, this, although pretty hard to programme by all accounts seems to have the facility to be able to communicate worldwide ?? my question is after looking at youtube for hours is, can you literally put in a known frequency and listen if you already know the frequency ?, i know setting it up to recieve and send is a mensa approved course that will take about a year to complete !! but can you just type in the frequency ? many thanks !
Not being funny - but have you actually played with it? turn it on, enter the frequency. If you have too many digits it ignores them and if too short it just sits there. If you enter in a frequency by default that is where the radio starts to work. They are NOT complicated, they just have an awful lot of menus that require you to read and learn what the shortened names mean. Most are kind of obvious, once you know. The on-line and printed manuals detail them all. The sequence of button pushing to programme in stuff for transmit is pretty crucial - but the Baofeng isn’t much use for transmitting as everywhere it can transmit requires a licence. You can easily, or with hard work get some of them, but the radio in many parts of the world can’t be legally used to transmit. People do, of course, but depending on where you are can make a big difference to the consequences.
If you want to listen to a known frequency, type it in - the correct number of zeros at the end is important, but when you enter some frequencies - like those that might be 167.16750MHz - it guesses the last bit for you anyway.
I can’t work out why you’ve not done this out of the box - you don’t need a manual for listening at all. Sticking things into memories gets a bit deeper, but not really by much.