Baofeng uv-82 almost ready for park use, but we have a problem

General Discussion
1

Not sure if this is the right section here but some of you all may have seen my thread earlier. I work for my state’s park system and have been without a radio. I was allowed to just buy my own ( yes, states should have more funding, yes I should not have to buy my own radio, yes the park has a licensed system, and yes I have permission from anyone I can think to ask). In the parks we often have baofeng uv-5r radios with a mix of nicer kenwoods, so I settled on the baofeng UV-82. We all complain about the baofeng 5r but after moving parks I’d be happy with one of those even if it worked half the time.

I was given the RX and TX (rx is 159.xxx and tx is 151.xxx and I was told not to give those last digits so whatever, but they are right).

We’ve been playing with this thing and after much frustration we get it to receive! We were pretty darn excited. It does not transmit. It makes our kenwood base light up, and our kenwood handheld has a led that lights up green, but no sound.

So we’re close, but not finished. What do we need? None of us are super technologically gifted. To put that into context we just learned about document sharing and were entertained seeing each other’s name and cursor on a text document…

Any help would be appreciated. Please give us simple info here since our radio knowledge is “push this button and talk” plus some basic odds and ends on how they work. Nothing too fancy I’m afraid.

2

So the Baofeng can hear the base station, but the base is not retransmitting what it hears FROM the Baofeng? Sounds like you’ve not entered the right tones? What does the base station use for access?

3

What are you using to program the UV-82? If you are trying to do it off the keypad, it will be an exercise in frustration. It sounds like your park is using a repeater system, and there may likely be CTCSS or DCS tones (sometimes incorrectly referred to as “privacy tones.”)

The easiest way to do this is to borrow a working UV5r radio; download Chirp software; read the UV5r and then duplicate the frequencies and tones into a file for the UV82.

If you don’t have the correct tone programmed into the radio, the radio will receive okay (plus any other users with tones enabled) but cannot be heard when it transmits. You need that correct tone. They should have given you the frequencies PLUS the CTCSS or DCS tone code. It will be listed something like 67.0 Hz, 233.6 Hz or something similar if CTCSS. It may also be something like 023, 165, etc. for DCS codes. Your park repeater will use one or the other; not both. The UV-82 can use either CTCSS or DCS codes.