Thanks to this forum, I’ve got my radios set up more-or-less how I’d like them.
One question I have though is the thread title.
I have 2 Baofeng UV-82 and 4 TID TD-M8. The Boafeng are “dual-band” and the TID are single-band.
The thing is, with the Baofeng, while they show two channels on the digital screen, and have a push to talk button for each channel, I can only hear audio on the one channel that is selected at any one time.
The channel that is not selected does not make any sound when someone is talking on it, even if it’s one of the two channels I can have on the screen.
To me, it seems that this essentially works exactly the same as the TID radios whereby, if a channel isn’t selected, no sound will come across the push-to-talk.
So how are they different? It seems like the Boafeng are basically single channel, just with a screen that shows two channels, each of which has it’s own push-to-talk button, rather than the TID which have no screen and I have to press a key to change the channel before pressing push to talk.
Is the whole “dual-band” thing a marketing gimmick, or am I missing something?
You are misunderstanding the term “dual band.” A dual band radio transmits and receives both VHF and UHF. A single band radio receives either VHF or UHF, not both.
What you are looking for is called dual watch. Your UV-82 radio is dual band (UHF/VHF) but also has dual watch capability. You need to enable this in programming.
If you are programming manually, go to menu #7 and change TDR TO “ON.”
Also scroll to menu #34 and change this to “OFF.”
So, radios can be dual band, without having dual watch. They are two vastly different things.
Thanks Chickenhawk, I had indeed misunderstood the dual-band feature and your menu instructions worked to receive traffic on both channels on the screen. The feature is called “dual-standby” in the voice of the menu option which I guess threw me a bit. Still learning here!
Do you know if there’s a way to have the scan feature continue to run on one of the channels on the screen of the UV-82 while I transmit on the other?
Right now if one of the channels on-screen is scanning, and I push-to-talk on the other, the scanning will stop.
There is no way to enable this. The only radio that could do this would need two completely separate transmitter and receiver circuitries. Consider that a two-way radio is not really made for scanning anyway, and it is just a handy additional feature but doesn’t replace a dedicated scanner.