# BaoFeng any good



## billybob

I am looking into getting my first ham radio. Looking for an inexpensive portable and saw BaoFeng's on Amazon. They seem to have good ratings and I was wondering if anyone here has ever owned or used one before.


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## cllowe

They are difficult to program. Spend the extra and get a yaesu ft 60. It is very user friendly and a good radio.


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## LincTex

"baofeng uv-5r programming"

http://www.hamuniverse.com/w7dtguv5rprogramming.html

http://www.miklor.com/uv5r/

https://hamgear.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/setting-up-and-programming-your-uv-5r/

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Cable-Baofeng-UV-5R-Driver/dp/B008RZJHJU

http://www.radiomanual.info/schemi/Vari/Baofeng_UV-5R_Manual_Programming.pdf


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## rhrobert

Yeah, they are very easy to program.
I have a uv-5r and the only problem I have is the battery failed in less than a month. Full charge, 3 1/2 weeks later it was dead after not having been used, and wouldn't take a charge.

I bought a pack that takes regular AA batteries (I use rechargeable) and a car charger pack for it and have had no issues since.


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## Starcreek

We have some Baofeng handhelds, and I like them, although you might want to go ahead and get a regular Ham radio, just because it has greater capabilities.

We've been very happy with the Baofeng. Our oldest son, who is more tech-savvy than we are, programmed ours for us. We have ham bands, family radio, and weather radio on it.

Our son's battery went dead, just like rhrobert said, but we haven't had any problems with ours. I think the issue is that if you leave the radio on, set on a shelf somewhere, and it goes completely, totally, all the way dead, it will not take a charge. When ours go dead, we turn them off and charge them up. Our son left his sitting turned on for several days, and it just wouldn't charge up anymore.


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## zombieresponder

cllowe said:


> They are difficult to program. Spend the extra and get a yaesu ft 60. It is very user friendly and a good radio.


I have both Baofeng UV5re+ and the Yaesu FT-60. The Baofengs are a pain to program manually, but it doesn't take much at all if you get the CHIRP program and a cable. The Yaesu is much simpler, but IMO it doesn't receive as well as the Baofengs. The Baofengs have a bettery battery in them(which is cheaper too, for what that's worth) than the old tech battery used in the Yaesu.The Baofengs are a much better buy.

The biggest downsides I see to the Boefengs are the lack of *good* AA or AAA battery trays(depending on which model you have/are looking at) and the oddball antenna connection. I'll be buying more Baofengs, but no more Yaesu HT's.

As far as the batteries going dead and then not taking a charge..most modern chargers need to "see" some sort of a voltage value or they won't start charging. The Baofeng UV5RE+'s I have use Li-ion batteries and from what I have seen, the chargers for the lithium mix type are even more picky. It doesn't mean that the battery is bad, just that you need to find a way to get enough voltage back into it for the charger to "see" it.


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## sgtusmc98

I've had my uv5re+ for about a year and its on almost every day including times it has shut itself off because of a dead battery and it charges right up but it doesn't sit for days dead either. If I don't talk much on it it can be on for several days with out dying. Pretty decent radio


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## bkt

The Baofeng UV5R radios are an excellent buy for the money. They receive and transmit extremely well with the Nagoya 771 antenna for HT use or some other antenna for mobile/base use. Chirp is free and lets you very easily program the radio. Granted, programming manually is not quick or intuitive but it is not impossible once you learn how to do it. I know how to do it but I still use Chirp.


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## SCDolphin

Great Radios, much better than Wouxan. I have both.
Hugh W4DRH


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## TheLazyL

billybob said:


> I am looking into getting my first ham radio. Looking for an inexpensive portable and saw BaoFeng's on Amazon. They seem to have good ratings and I was wondering if anyone here has ever owned or used one before.


If the price is extremely lower then anyone else, I'm leery of buying junk.

Saying that I went ahead and ordered a UV-5RE for $30.59

Programming hard? Manually perhaps, more tedious then hard. When I ordered the radio I also ordered the Baofeng Programming cable for $5.99

Went online and downloaded the free CHRPS software. Took longer to install the driver for the Programing cable then it did to program the radio.

So far I'm impressed.

Programed for all of our present day communications and for TEOTWAWKI.

Yesterday I order two of the UV-5RE plus models. 2 pack for $67.95 and a Nagoya NA-771 16 inch antenna.

Plan on using the UV-5RE with the 16" antenna as the base. Each family head will have one of the UV-5RE plus and the rest of he family members GRMS/FRS radios.


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## indyalways

I dumped the stock UHF/VHF antenna...it's performance leaves a lot to be desired. Spend a little on a quality UHF/VHF antenna and you should be happy. Or, spend a few bucks more and get the Anytone tri band ht radio. Outperforms the Baofeng.


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## bkt

the Nagoya 701 and 771 antennas are very inexpensive and greatly enhance the performance of the Baofeng. A j-pole roll-up is what I have one radio connected to in my office. (The antenna is in the attic.) The roll-up cost about $30 and the improvement is excellent.

Got a link on the Anytone tri-band HT? I found a couple references to it but couldn't find it for sale anywhere. Having 1.25 in the mix would be nice.


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## oldvet

Well shoot, I thought Baofeng was Chinese food.


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## Padre

I own a bunch of them and my only complaint, which I think coincides with all other comments I have read, is that they have spotty quality control.


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## indyalways

Here's a link for an Anytone radio distributor...

http://wouxun.us/


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## JAR702

The Baofeng radio is a good radio for the price, it is the choice radio for the prepper group I am in. We live in east TN and they work well even in the mountains.


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## frankd4

The Baofeng HP is eight Watts and has turned out to be a good radio we use them in our community we have about sixty of them and have gotten alot of use with very little problems.


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## frankd4

indyalways said:


> I dumped the stock UHF/VHF antenna...it's performance leaves a lot to be desired. Spend a little on a quality UHF/VHF antenna and you should be happy. Or, spend a few bucks more and get the Anytone tri band ht radio. Outperforms the Baofeng.


The MFL 1717 antenna works great.


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## TheLazyL

JAR702 said:


> The Baofeng radio is a good radio for the price, it is the choice radio for the prepper group I am in. We live in east TN and they work well even in the mountains.


Please advise what general frequencies you are getting the best range from and what that range is.


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## bkt

I can hit repeaters with crystal clear results six or seven miles away reliably with mine with both VHF and UHF frequencies. You won't get much farther than that with any radio due to the radio horizon unless you get into HF, or you or your target are significantly elevated.


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## zombieresponder

I can hit the local 2m repeater from here at the house using an upgraded antenna on either my Baofeng or Yaesu. That repeater is roughly 10 miles away when I checked via google earth. I don't recall for sure, but I think elevation was pretty close to the same. 

I normally put a 25' length of coax and a roll up J pole on the Yaesu if I want to talk....it improves the signal substantially on the receiving end. Without the J pole up a tree, I can be heard, but the signal is faint and noisy.


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## bkt

Yep, I have a jpole roll-up in the attic with a feed line strung to my office on the second floor and that really improves reception. They're cheap and they work great.

For folks who may be wondering about radio range this might be helpful. Radio should be considered line-of-sight pretty much like light is line-of-sight (but radio can actually travel slightly beyond the visible horizon). The curvature of the earth prevents you from seeing too far in the distance unless you are elevated or what you're trying to look at is elevated. One method to calculate the line-of-sight range of your radio transmission is based on antenna height. The same is true of visual line of sight.

Let's say you're on the beach and you want to know how far you can see out on the ocean. You take the height (in feet) divided by 0.5736 and take the square root of that number and that gives you the distance in statute miles for line-of-sight distance. For example:

Height to the center of your eyeballs = 5.5ft
5.5ft divided by 0.5736 = 9.588
Square root of 9.588 = 3.10 statute miles, which is the visual horizon - the maximum distance to the horizon - you could see on a clear day if standing on the beach looking out across the ocean.

Here is a way to calculate the radio horizon since there are two points that matter in regard to elevation, where H1 is the height of one antenna and H2 is the height of the other antenna:

Square root of H1 (in feet) x 1.415 = D1
Square root of H2 (in feet) x 1.415 = D2
The radio horizon in statute miles is the sum of D1 and D2.

Example: Let's say a repeater's antenna is 200' up on a building or tower and my antenna is 20' up in my house.

The square root of 200 is (roughly) 14.142. 14.142 x 1.415 = 20.011.
The square root of 20 is 4.472. 4.472 x 1.415 = 6.328.
20.011 + 6.328 = 26.339 statute miles.

As long as my house and the repeater I want to reach are within 26 miles of one another and there are no significant obstructions, I should be able to reach it.

You also have to take land elevation into account but this should help give you a rough estimate.

UHF - also known as 70cm or 440MHz - is better for use in and around buildings for relatively close range. VHF - also known as 2M or 144MHz tends to reach farther outdoors than UHF given the same wattage. I find I can reliably hit repeater antennas that are within 5 miles of my house with both UHF and VHF and reception is excellent.

For those why may not know the term, a "repeater" is a radio tranceiver that takes an incoming weak signal (like from my Baofeng UV-5R) and retransmits it with much more power from an antenna mounted up high in order to reach an area much larger than I could normally reach.


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## JAR702

TheLazyL, we use the Morristown 145.520 and Newport 145.470 repeaters, the range with standard antennas is up to 35 miles so far that we have tested, Rutledge to Cosby. We have site line to the Morristown repeater. People in Dandridge can get a further range than us here especially with a Jpole.


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## TheLazyL

JAR702 said:


> TheLazyL, we use the Morristown 145.520 and Newport 145.470 repeaters, the range with standard antennas is up to 35 miles so far that we have tested, Rutledge to Cosby. We have site line to the Morristown repeater. People in Dandridge can get a further range than us here especially with a Jpole.


I was more interested in the range handheld to handheld of the Baofengs.


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## HELIXX

Thanks for posting this guys


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## fteter

A little late to this party, but I'll still throw in my two cents...

Just earned my ham Technician license a few weeks ago. And, after heavy on-line research, I went with the Baofeng UV-82. Wound up with three: one for the house and two for go-bags. The money I saved in choosing Baofeng went toward better antennas (a Diamond X30a mounted in the attic, and roll-up Slim Jim antennas in each go-bag) and back-up batteries. Also have Tram 1185 antennas in each go-bag, just in case I find myself in a situation where it's easier to find a good metal ground plane than a tree for the antenna.

So far, so good. Programming with CHIRP (it's free) is pretty easy. Manual programming is tedious, but not difficult otherwise. No quality complaints at all. With the Diamond I frequently work 35 miles simplex in mountainous terrain, and I work a 2 meter repeater that is 51 miles away (as the crow flies) every day. About 25 miles with the Slim Jim or Tram antennas. The receive function of the Baofeng coupled with a solid antenna is amazingly good in comparison to HTs (and some mobiles) at 5 times the price.

My research indicated that the Nagoya antennas don't really help the UV-82 like they do the UV-5x family. But I did manage to double the HT range for about 19 cents apiece...cut a 14 inch "rat tail" for each using 14 gauge wire. Simplex is now about 15 miles...maybe down to 10 at worst case if I'm transmitting from HT to HT with both using stock antennas and trying to get through the ridge directly south of my home. But your results will likely be better...I'm in some seriously mountainous country (the Wasatch mountain range to the East and South, the Oquirrh mountain range to the West).

I've got about $32 dollars tied up in each radio. $20 each for the Tram antennas. $30 each for the Slim Jims. $10 each for a backup battery. So $92 for a fully operating VHF/UHF emergency communications system with alternate antennas and redundant emergency power - can't beat that with a stick. Admittedly, the Diamond was $70, but I bought that for fun as much as anything else...I know lots of folks using a flexible j-pole hung by a window who do just fine.

Yup, I'm really happy with the Baofeng. Believe it to be one of the best values around.


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## billybob

fteter said:


> A little late to this party, but I'll still throw in my two cents...
> 
> Just earned my ham Technician license a few weeks ago. And, after heavy on-line research, I went with the Baofeng UV-82. Wound up with three: one for the house and two for go-bags. The money I saved in choosing Baofeng went toward better antennas (a Diamond X30a mounted in the attic, and roll-up Slim Jim antennas in each go-bag) and back-up batteries. Also have Tram 1185 antennas in each go-bag, just in case I find myself in a situation where it's easier to find a good metal ground plane than a tree for the antenna.
> 
> So far, so good. Programming with CHIRP (it's free) is pretty easy. Manual programming is tedious, but not difficult otherwise. No quality complaints at all. With the Diamond I frequently work 35 miles simplex in mountainous terrain, and I work a 2 meter repeater that is 51 miles away (as the crow flies) every day. About 25 miles with the Slim Jim or Tram antennas. The receive function of the Baofeng coupled with a solid antenna is amazingly good in comparison to HTs (and some mobiles) at 5 times the price.
> 
> My research indicated that the Nagoya antennas don't really help the UV-82 like they do the UV-5x family. But I did manage to double the HT range for about 19 cents apiece...cut a 14 inch "rat tail" for each using 14 gauge wire. Simplex is now about 15 miles...maybe down to 10 at worst case if I'm transmitting from HT to HT with both using stock antennas and trying to get through the ridge directly south of my home. But your results will likely be better...I'm in some seriously mountainous country (the Wasatch mountain range to the East and South, the Oquirrh mountain range to the West).
> 
> I've got about $32 dollars tied up in each radio. $20 each for the Tram antennas. $30 each for the Slim Jims. $10 each for a backup battery. So $92 for a fully operating VHF/UHF emergency communications system with alternate antennas and redundant emergency power - can't beat that with a stick. Admittedly, the Diamond was $70, but I bought that for fun as much as anything else...I know lots of folks using a flexible j-pole hung by a window who do just fine.
> 
> Yup, I'm really happy with the Baofeng. Believe it to be one of the best values around.


Hey I know where you are :wave: I'm in Saratoga Springs just east of Israel Canyon. Shoot me a PM and let's see if we can get together and let me check out what you are doing and learn from your experience, if you are OK with that. We've lived in the Sandy/Draper area for 25 years and just moved to the west side of Utah Lake in Saratoga this past fall. Love it out here. I may be mistaken but I think there may be a repeater right on top of the hill here at Israel Canyon.


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