All,
I can confirm that I got both radios to beacon my call sign and -4 on one and -7 on the other. Today (September 19, 2025) I will be driving to Paris and then to Bob Sandlin State Park, so you may see them beaconing as I do some testing. They are fairly primitive, they do not do “smart beaconing” like the Yaesu, but instead just beacon on a time interval that you select from a menu. The choices are 30 seconds, 60 seconds and 5 minutes. Maybe more, but for sure it has those three.
The theory appears to be solid, we can get people into an APRS unit for no more than $45. My kit came with a lot, I mean a lot, of stuff. Two radios and each radio has four antennas, two batteries, a charging cradle, hand mic, ear bud, belt clip and maybe some other goodies that I am not recalling. Each of them has all of that stuff. The kit came with each radio and its goodies packaged in a separate box, with one box labeled “Programming Cable Inside” (see pictures) and indeed there is only one Baofeng branded cable included.
My radios were both firmware v2.0.6. I flashed them up to v2.0.9 and that is the baseline firmware version required for the APRS to work. Now, this is where it got to be a bit of a pain. The URL for the firmware update is buried a little bit cryptically in the Q&A on Amazon, but the link is:
https://walkietalkiesoftware.com/portal/index/software_detail/id/85.html
They make you register with an email address to give you access to the file. Of note – The programming video is worthless, use the links above to aid you in flashing it. And guess what? Drop me a note and members of the Club will be provided a link to the file without doing all of that nonsense. I am not going to provide the link here because I don’t want Baofeng to get irate at me for making it easy for everyone, but I’ll make it easy for Club members.
Here’s where it gets really sketchy – The software install is quite buggy. It triggers all kinds of file and anti-virus warning and it had to download a file from Microsoft for the installation to run. But, once I got through all of that nonsense, told 
the software what Com Port to use (I kid you not…) then the flash process only took maybe a minute. But finding the file, installing it and figuring out how to push the three left-side buttons – before connecting the cable – and get the first radio into “black screen” flash mode; that took me a couple of hours to figure out. And while programming your call sign into the radios for APRS here’s another tip – There is nowhere I can find that tells you how to change from letters to numbers or how to insert a symbol (although you won’t need one here), but you use the pound key (#) to change from upper case letters to lower case letters to numbers. Push # and look at the upper right corner of the screen and you can see that each push changes what your keypad will be able to enter. And now to the other part that isn’t really intuitive, the dash and number telling people you are afoot, driving, etc. That is done on another screen entirely. Enter your call sign and hit the green button to go up a menu layer. You will then need to scroll down, I think it is the very next choice, and when you select it you will see your APRS symbol options.
As of now I believe these radios are still incompatible with CHIRP. If you determine otherwise please pipe up here and let us know. And please drop me a note if you need firmware v2.0.9.
73
Phillip Beall (W5EBC)