All,
I took the pair of Baofeng handhelds on a road trip over the last weekend. And they performed adequately to the task of being a low-cost option for an APRS beacon. There are some serious issues worth mentioning:
1) When you take these radios out and turn on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and APRS features, right away you need to go in and change the beacon type from MICE-E (emergency) to in-transit or some other choice. They are defaulted to the emergency beacon and I can attest that it works. I had email and text messages from a local ham that monitors anything and everything and a lady down in Dallas was so concerned she called the Lamar County Sheriff’s Office. Once I got their messages, embarrassed, I immediately set about remedying the problem. So, lesson learned – FIX THAT MICE-E SETTING PROMPTLY.
2) These radios are tri-banders, but you can’t mute the APRS beacon or even turn the volume on it down without turning the volume down for the whole radio. Yes, if you want to listen to it and talk on it, you get to listen to the very annoying APRS beacon the entire time. Solution? Unless they fix that with a firmware update, for example giving us the option to mute the APRS beacon; unless someone smarter than me can figure out a solution that pretty much relegates it to being JUST an APRS beacon. You just put it into a mount and turn the volume all the way down and let it do its APRS thing and talk on another radio.
3) There is a list of letters and characters in the unit allowing you to pick what symbol you want to broadcast. It defaults to the little guy running afoot. The list is not intuitive, so if anyone has a picture or table of the letters and symbols and what they correspond to – the one Baofeng uses – and can provide it to me to post here; I guess it is just trial and error to figure it out. Searching online there are a lot of different illustrations and they vary based on age, manufacturer of the radio, etc.
Finally, some have found the radio cheaper and I am fine with that. Please just make sure you do an apples-to-apples comparison. The two-pack kit I initially posted about includes a lot – A LOT – of optional stuff. I don’t know if the cheaper radio will have any of those things, so buyer beware. For sure you will need their proprietary programming cable, so if what you are looking at does not include that, no deal.
74
Phillip Beall (W5EBC)