There was a time when buying a new radio was something many hams could never afford to do. Then came the super cheap — and super controversial — VHF and UHF radios from China. But as they say, you get what you pay for. The often oddly named handhelds like Baofeng and Wouxun are sometimes odd to work with and may have questionable RF outputs. A new radio has a less tongue-twisting English name and many improved features for about $50 — the Talkpod A36Plus and [Josh] shows us how they work in a video that you can see below.
The new features are generally good. For example, the radio can pick up AM in the aircraft band, something most of these cheap radios won’t do. It works on VHF and UHF bands but also picks up FM broadcasts. The USB-C connector is welcome, and the screen is large and colorful. It has 500 channels and IP5 water resistance.
There were a few issues, though. If you want to use it as a scanner, it’s not very fast. The radio comes with a programming cable, but apparently, it uses an odd USB chipset that may give you some driver issues. The biggest problem, though, is that it has, according to the video, excessive spurious emissions. The power isn’t that high, and the antenna probably filters off some of it, too. But creating interference across the band isn’t very polite.
How bad are the harmonics? Well, [Josh] hooks up a spectrum analyzer and also shows how a radio tuned to the second harmonic easily picks up the transmission. Of course, no radio is perfect, but it seems like it does have very strong harmonic emissions. Of course, it may or may not be any worse than similar cheap radios. They are probably all above the legal limits, and it is just a matter of degrees.
These little radios won’t directly work the world — you need an HF radio for that, generally. They will let you connect to local repeaters, though. Some of those cheap radios can lead to interesting projects, too.
> The often oddly named handhelds like Baofeng and Wouxun
Just had to look these up.
Baofeng is a county in China known for industry since the 12 century, the word itself means storm (named after the smelting etc that took place there and which explains why STORM RADIO is so often in autotranslated copy).
W ou xun loosely translates to Sing to the world communication.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baofeng_County
https://wouxun.com/wouxun/about.aspx
The really confusing thing (to me) about Baofeng radios is the crazy number of radios branded as Baofeng that don’t exist on the Baofeng site.
The radios are Sonotrans rebranded as Baofeng.
“W ou xun loosely translates to Sing to the world communication.”
That’s cool, I didn’t know that. Thanks my friend! 😎👍
Speaking of Wouxun, a ham once told me that it’s being intended to be pronouned as “Ocean”.
I wonder if that’s true. Maybe for marketing reasons? Ocean surely sounds nice to western customers.
I mean, Trio/Kenwood became “Kenwood” because the founder wanted his company to sound “western and cool and strong”. So he combined “Ken” (Barbie’s friend?) and “Wood”. Or so I heard. 😹
I recently just learned it is pronounced “ocean” on a video blog about their new radio. Which is pretty sweet if you ask me. I forget the model, but I’m sure it can be found easily. It’s a quad band radio. Pretty sweet.
Radio is a wormhole/time sink I keep meaning to get into :D
internet>radio
k.
you understand that “the internet” is mediated via radio as well right?
or do you mean “IP via TCP over the ISM bands > analog voice via FM modulation over ham bands”
regardless, it can be very difficult to find trees with ethernet jacks when you’re on a hike.
yes, but why not put packet radio inside this dev?
for short message
Actually.. This would be indeed very cool. It’s completely open, too, so no patents are being hurt.
At 1200 Baud software-implementation is no problem. Arduino Unos can do that.
And there’s also some progress. FX.25, for example, is a very new addition to AX.25 that adds FEC and is 100% backwards compatible. Direwolf and sound modem support it.
With FX.25, APRS on 2m (Packet Radio) could realistically compete with LoRa APRS.
The main issue with classic APRS was that all data packets (100%) must be intact. A single bit error, and the APRS frame was discarded.
And because UI-Frames used by APRS are connectionless (passive), a second, fixed packet was never received. With a tiny bit of error correction added (FEC, as in FX.25), this flaw is fixed.
And when you don’t have reliable internet access because you’re in a dead zone, or there’s an outage, just shout as loud as you can? Simple radios in planes, trucks, tractors, and on the belts of millions of blue collar workers are very good at making sure people can coordinate with each other when there’s a job that depends on it and a smartphone isn’t going to change that. When you have to do the same kind of work, but you’re not getting paid for it, a cheap ham radio is a nice thing to have. Head and shoulders above a little FRS handheld, but even that’s got advantages over cell phones.
ok, why chinese enginer not put normal ax25 or modem (kiss or other)
simple send and receive a data, and mesh sending with 3 hop or more.
FX.25 is even better. It’s like a mantle that encloses AX.25 and adds error correction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX.25_Forward_Error_Correction
What bothers me is the difficulty in cleaning up the emissions problem. If that were ‘easily’ fixable, for a given value of easy, with hobbyist resources I’d be interested.
As is? I honestly want an HTX-202 with the battery replaced by something replaceable withotu having to resolder connections. Far fewer features and heavier and on and on, but rock solidp erformance.
“the radio can pick up AM in the aircraft band, something most of these cheap radios won’t do. It works on VHF and UHF bands but also picks up FM broadcasts. The USB-C connector is welcome”
This costs about three times as much as the Quansheng radio, which has all the features you list here. Is the RF output better than that of the aforementioned/Baofeng? Otherwise I’m struggling to see why I should pay more for one of these.
I find the AM reception terrible on airband. Calls sound distorted like they’re off frequency. As if the filter goes from extremely narrow to wide on its own as it receives