The Quansheng UV-K5 is a popular handheld radio. It’s useful out of the box, but also cherished for its modification potential. [OM0ET] purchased one of these capable VHF/UHF radios, but got to hacking—as he wanted to use it as a desktop radio instead!
This might just sound like a simple reshell, but there was actually a bit of extra work involved. Most notably, the Quansheng is designed to be tuned solely by using the keypad. For desktop use, though, that’s actually kind of a pain. Thus, to make life easier, [OM0ET] decided to whip up a little encoder control to handle tuning and other control tasks using an ESP32. This was achieved with help from one [OM0WT] and files for that are on Github. Other tasks involved finding a way to make the keypad work in a new housing, and how to adapt things like the audio and data module and the speaker to their new homes.
Despite the original handheld being much smaller than the case used here, you’d be surprised how tight everything fits in the case. Still, the finished result looks great. We’ve seen some other adaptable and upgradable ham radio gear before, too. Sometimes custom is the way to go! Video after the break.
That looks like a Takachi enclosure…
I have been looking at lots of benchtop hardware lately and have been sorely disappointed with most formfactors, and rehousing something honestly didn’t seem like a practical project but this is amazing inspiration!
I am not surprised, but have yet to run into a bad one myself. I see an ever increasing number of others using them too.
Also it and its numerous clones were unreliable AF. Boss had the idea of replacing the old Motorola T200 keychain radios with some of those and bought a pack of five or so. Big mistake. For one they didn’t recognize the programming cable which is supposed to be standard nor the software when they were in the mood to listen.
And people always found a way to unlock them and screw the settings.
I toyed with the idea of buying a real radio for myself only (a Kenwood or Yaesu) but it was just not worth it.
I’ve thought about adding rotary encoder in place of the LED on my UV-K6 to use for UP/Down/Select, it would greatly improve the usability.
I looked at the firmware for the controller in this project, and frankly I’m unimpressed. It’s a poor choice of processor for such a simple task.
To replace a pair of up/down buttons you could use an Alps SRBM1L0800 rotary pulse switch:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007262397665.html
Unfortunately it doesn’t have a pushbutton built in.
It’s a one off and it works so what more do you want?
It doesn’t have to be optimal or the way you would do it.
What more do I want? Something less inelegant.
For example, the firmware in the radio can be modified, so the rotary encoder could be hooked up directly to the switch I/O pins, and the firmware rewritten to accommodate it.
Why did I write about the pulse switch? So that others can see an alternative method and use it if they wanted to. I’m sure you didn’t know about it, so now you do.
Both of these ideas mean that an additional micro is not needed, meaning that the space inside the box is less cramped.
You’re obviously free to create your own ‘elegant’ solution.
I suppose you’d also dump on my conversions of old 8Ch Icom PMR radios because I added a processor module and OLED to give memories, duplex, CTCSS and 200Ch on a rotary encoder instead of working out how to unlock the original OTP processor and reprogram it…
I do understand you. It bothers me, too if something is done poorly.
I can’t sleep sometimes, even, because it bothers me so much.
I then sit up in bed and and take a few notes on a notepad, describing how to improve it.
That helps me to go back to sleep. Problem isn’t solved, but I got peace of mind.
No. I wouldn’t.
A lot of great ideas and techniques in this build. I was soldering wires to a flexible connectors and then to my board. The idea of securing a daughter board ‘locally’ and wiring onto and off of that didn’t occur to me. This technique appears to be more stable. While I may have chosen some different components based on what I have on-hand the overall build quality is pretty solid. Great re-use of existing items too.
Would love to see an HF version for desktop use with rotary encoder.
I need audio modem inside or interface to raspberry pi inside
for Packet radio, reticulum, M17, APRS and other
Indeed. An FM discriminator output is required for serious Packet Radio operation (9K6 Baud FSK).
Even AFSK at 1200 and 2400 Baud works poorly via ear phone output.
A direct AF input that bypasses the microphone amp would be nice, too.
For example, things like CTCSS use an below 100 Hz tone that gets being surpressed by the mic amp.
(The same surpressing or filter curve for low frequencies might also make the 1200 Hz tone of Packet Radio sound weaker than 2200 Hz tone.)
That’s why CTCSS is so difficult to retrofit on classic radios here in Europe/Germany, by the way.
In case you wonder, we traditionally used to use 1750 Hz tone to open FM repeaters (FM relays).
CTCSS was an American thing that some of us didn’t want to get, at all.
Still don’t want to get, even. So our radios didn’t have it for a long time, either.
It wasn’t until the 2000s that more and more FM repeaters moved over to CTCSS (sadly!), rendering classic radios inoperable for FM repeater use (some repeaters use carrier detection instead of CTCSS).
This is exactly what I did with my Talkpod A36plus:
https://github.com/M17-Project/A36plus_mod
Wow I would love one of those made up, is there any chance of getting one. Paul M1AFQ
I’m not going to post a direct link because such sites are trash, but it looks like Hackaday articles are getting posted on a cryptocurrency/tech spam site. “U S A goldmines” and the “Quansheng” keywords should get you there with a search. Lewin’s name is in the URL but there’s a fake author’s name at the top of the article. From looking at their “suggested” articles at the bottom it seems like they are just scraping a bunch of their content from Hackaday. Dirty parasites.
What a technical and esthetic abomination this is.