[Phillip Beall (W5EBC)]

All,

Several times over the past few years there have been discussions about how to get more members of the RRVARC outfitted with Automatic Position Reporting System (APRS) gear.  We aren’t going to harangue people to beacon all the time when they are enjoying the hobby, but there are times when it is truly helpful.  Bike rally’s and storm chasing are the two that immediately come to mind for me.

I and others have looked at options and compared notes and the cheapest we have found a turnkey solution for was a little north of $150.  I always kind of figured if we started getting corporate sponsors professional website assistance for our continued development of the site and some solution to the APRS beacons would be two things we needed to invest in.  As an aside, you can put an APRS app on your smartphone, but from experience with Tour de Paris we know of two problems: 1) Going in and out of weak or nonexistent phone service areas the beacon sometimes stops and nobody realizes it. 2) It is a massive battery hog guaranteeing you that you have to stay plugged in just about all the time.  One outfit, TRACKERBOX has a turnkey solution designed precisely for what we would want.  And PICO APRS is starting to hit its stride for balloons.  But all of them are at a price point that is just too high without grant or sponsor money.  I kept thinking there just had to be a more economical solution.

Doing research on something else entirely I ran across the newest latest and greatest Baofeng 5RH Pro advertising GPS and APRS and tri-band capability.  I was a little dubious, did some reading, shared the link with a couple of buddies in the Club (Amazon – BAOFENG 5RH PRO GPS Ham Radio 10W High Power, VHF/1.25M/UHF (4PSC Batteries, 8 Antennas), 8 Bands Long Range Two Way Radio Handheld, APRS, Air Band, NOAA,Tri Band, Upgrade of BAOFENG 5RM 2 Pack Full Kit ($89.99)) but kept waiting and reading before finally squeezing the trigger a few minutes ago.  The math is pretty simple – If this two-pack of radios has functional APRS then I can do APRS for basically $45, or less than a third of what we previously figured it would cost.  So, how APRS capable are they and based on past experience with Baofeng equipment how much of a PITA would it be to program and use?  It is new enough that when I started looking at them about six weeks ago I could not find much info on those two points, but it did seem they are not as user friendly as Yaesu’s and the likes.  No surprise there, right?

Looking online I finally did find some guys that got into the nuts and bolts of it and got it to working.  Jay’s Technical Talk – Configuring a Baofeng 5RH-Pro radio to beacon your GPS position via APRS is the best “write up” I found.  He’s down on the radio overall, but to me for the purpose outlined above it looks very promising.  Important note – You need to make sure right away that any that you buy are already firmware v2.0.9 or get it upgraded to that because it has to be at least that firmware version or higher for the APRS to work.  In addition to this write up there were a couple of videos.  Baofeng UV-5RM PLUS GPS review (UV-5RH Pro), Airband … – at 23 minutes it is long, involved and the guy has an accent that makes it hard to follow.  And he never really fully broke the code on how to get the APRS to work.  Not so that I could understand him well enough to know for sure anyway.  I get the idea that this guy BAOFENG UV5RH Pro – APRS MODEL TESTING had watched that last video and then using what he learned from there and jumped right into the APRS stuff and made his own video.  He DID get it to work and he solved at least one issue the other guy left dangling.  And at a little over 3 minutes long it is much more doable for my taste.

I have the kit ordered and it is supposed to be here on Monday.  Next Friday I am going to be taking a little trip where I think I will have time to fool with them.  If I can confirm they beacon APRS reliably I will be excited to make a follow up post here and then maybe do a show and tell at an upcoming meeting.  And then – THEN – we might have an economical solution to having better coverage with APRS for the bike rallies, weather events, etc.

I have been a big fan of APRS forever.  And it was one of the primary reasons that Kathy and I got into the hobby.  We see it as a fantastic “situational awareness” (SA) tool to help us to make sure that family and friends can track us down if they really need to.  An ancillary benefit is helping us with SA for each other and our ability to use them for events like bike rallies.  It seemed to me that our Club was kind of slow on the uptake.  Kathy and I were running an APRS digipeater/gateway at our house long before the Club added the one at Atlas.   I sense that some people maybe can’t afford it, some don’t want people to know where they are and others are just traditionalists that don’t see the value that I see.  But if you ask the guys who were at the EOC for the last two TdP rallies; they’re big fans.  It helps them tremendously to have a real-time and accurate depiction of where their assets in the field are all located at any given moment.  At $45 per unit these particular devices may be game changers, we will see.

73

Phillip Beall (W5EBC)

[Phillip Beall (W5EBC)]

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)

[Phillip Beall (W5EBC)]

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)

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