TerriKennedy

I wrote the CPS for the BF-F8HP Pro and co-manage firmware development, as well as dabbling in manuals and marketing. The BF-F8HP Pro has user-upgradable firmware and the upgrade tool is integrated into the CPS. There have been 3 public releases of firmware (V29, V33 and V44) and there will likely be ongoing future releases. The radio you bought on the first day it was available (October 1, 2024), today, and at some indefinite point in the future will all be able to run the latest firmware. Feedback from users here, on Facebook and elsewhere gets evaluated and often results in new features and/or bug fixes. I don't know anything about the UV-28 Plus - I stopped collecting random Baofeng models once I got involved in the BF-F8HP Pro project. BTW, you can get 20% off the BF-F8HP Pro (radio only, not accessories or other models) on the https://baofengtech.com web site (not Amazon) by using coupon code "CPS" at checkout. * It should be obvious that I'm involved with the BF-F8HP Pro project, but here's a disclaimer anyway.

When I'm conducting tests (on air and not into dummy loads) I announce my call sign and "Testing" and when done, my call sign and "Clear". That way if I'm interfering with someone they can specifically refer to me by call sign to get my attention. If I hear a request for a radio check I'll reply with my call sign "copies you 5 by 5" or whatever reception quality I think I'm receiving. There's a couple of guys who rag-chew for several hours on .700 simplex every evening without ever IDing. Most boring conversation imaginable. My repeater ID's every 15 minutes if continually up, then 15 minutes after the last transmission and then goes silent until somebody keys it up again. There are some near me that ID every 15 minutes in both Morse and voice and announce the (incorrect) time regardless of traffic (and I've never heard any traffic other than the automated announcements).

Even with an InReach, you need to evaluate the situation and decide if it's the best solution in any given situation. [Trigger warning - really graphic gory stuff follows.] In 2019 I fell while hiking on a mountain in the Mojave Desert in California. To be specific, I was standing on a rock that decided to disintegrate. I lost my balance, windmilled wildly for a few seconds, realized the situation wasn't salvageable and that I was falling into a jumble of large boulders. I instinctively put my right hand (I'm nominally right-handed) on my neck to guard my spine. After I landed, I took stock of where I was and the condition I was in. I had fully broken both bones (radius and ulna) in my right forearm, with the bones sticking out. My knuckles were pretty scraped up and I wasn't sure if I'd broken anything there, either. I was not losing blood (although there was a lot of bleeding) and I could both feel my fingers and move them, so there was no risk of bleeding out and no apparent nerve / muscle damage. If you remember the Harry Potter movie where Harry breaks his arm and the crackpot wizard 'fixes' it by removing all the bones in his arm, that's about it, but with more blood and protruding bones. I got some of my army surplus emergency clotting powder (the yellowish stuff) out of my pack and dumped it on the spots where I was leaking blood. I snapped one of my hiking poles (I wasn't going to be able to use both of them, anyway) to create a makeshift splint and used one of those giant Target plastic bags (that they used to give out when shopping, and which I carried to port out any trash I made or found), poked a hole across the bottom to put my arm in, and put the handles over my head. FWIW, in the late 1970's I was on the volunteer first aid squad in the town I grew up in, and have also had more recent survival training). With the immediate emergency taken care of, I drank some water and took a pain pill from my pack and sat down on a less defective rock to take stock of the situation. I was WAY up on the side of a mountain, hours from the nearest hospital (as part of my pre-hike planning, I always take note of where the nearest urgent care / hospital / regional trauma center is). I had an InReach (and the SAR 50 plan that covers up to $50K in rescue costs) with me. However, I was in the middle of nowhere (Inyo County is twice the size of the state of Connecticut and has 18,500 people living it, none near me). I figured if I pushed the button, LifeFlight would send a helicopter from Pahrump, NV (the closest medical facility), land down on the flatlands near where the Jeep was parked, look up the mountain and go "NFW" and call out mutual aid from San Bernardino Mountain Rescue. Which, aside from being in another county and several hours away, I know those guys well and it would have been pretty embarrassing. They would have to carry a litter from the helicopter up the mountain to me, strap me into it, and have the helicopter fly up over me and drop a line down to hook onto the litter. So I decided to self-rescue. An hour and an half to get down the mountain to the Jeep, an hour across open desert and dirt roads, and another hour on paved roads to get to Pahrump. So, 3.5 hours total. I decided I could do that in less time than being rescued via the InReach, so that's what I did. With a fair amount of screaming in pain as I drove over bumpy areas. I was proven right about 6 months later when someone had a similar accident nearby, but closer to the nearest place where people lived (calling it a town would be vastly overstating things) and it took over 9 hours for LifeFlight and SB mutual aid to get that person to the same hospital I drove to. The moral of the story is that you need to be self-sufficient in the wilderness, and also be able to evaluate your situation and make the best decision possible based on the information you have and your training. If you're alone and unconscious or pinned and unable to move, nothing will save you. If you enlarge the attached picture, you can see red captions for "Where I Fell" and "Jeep" to get a feel for the situation I was in.

I'm on here mostly to collect feedback on the BF-F8HP Pro, make sure it gets to either the firmware developers, BTECH support, or something I should fix in the CPS. I don't have to be here. None of this "Brand Ambassador" stuff is in my job description. I also try to contribute useful information, since I've been a GMRS licensee for quite some time, know what is involved in setting up and operating a racked repeater with a tower antenna, and similar stuff. But enough about me... I thought one of the rules for this site was to maintain civil discussion. I interpreted Randy's post here as both non-civil and a personal attack. Anyway, this has devolved well away from the OP's 'I ordered a radio advertised with a 15" antenna and didn't get it'. Let's get back to technical stuff and friendly rag-chewing.

The BF-F8HP Pro is specifically marketed as an amateur radio and has full Tx coverage in those bands. You might find that it will Tx out of those bands, but it is not type approved for that use.

There's a battery eliminator (car lighter adapter) for the BF-F8HP Pro (I only work on that model - If I did more models everybody at BTECH would be running around trying to satisfy the requests I pass through from users). I have never found a good corded microphone, across Baofeng, Radtel, Hiroyasu and other brands of radios and quite a few different microphones, ranging from the "$2 extra when you buy a radio" to the $25 BTECH QHM22. They all produce a very unpleasant crack sound when keyed and released. I suspect a capacitor in the microphone body would help - the trick is selecting one that will fix the crack without ruining the audio. The earphones w/ microphone/PTT cord are rather sub-optimal. I have a customer who has been using one for months and loves it, but others who get the same one say they fall apart rapidly. I'm sure there are good ones, it's just a market segment I haven't investigated.

I was going to let this slide. But hey, it's Tuesday and I'm under my quota of arguments for the week so far... 1) It's Terri with an "i", short for Teresa. Which you'd know if you'd ever used any of my CPS programs. 2) Standard box size. Let's see. Here's a picture of 16 different Baofeng models in their boxes. I'm sorry I could only stack 4 high by 4 wide before I ran out of space. Front and top views. These are all single radios (which is what started this post). Obviously a box for a pair of radios, or more, would be larger. 3) "Nearly every radio manufactured by Baofeng (dozens)" Yup. Riggghhhhttttt. I have 34 different models, all unboxed, right now in my line of sight, not to mention the ones in the boxes in the pictures. Nor all of the ones I've given away. Here's a screen capture from a Baofeng factory promotional video where it shows just a small part of their showroom before the image pans around and looks down rows and rows of different models on display. 4) I could probably stuff a small rattlesnake into a standard size Baofeng box. Neither it, a 15" antenna, or the customer would be happy when the box was opened. You come along, all high and mighty with your proclamations here because you're a Youtube superstar with (as of just now) 266K subscribers and almost nobody is willing to stand up and call "BS" to your face. Well, surprise! Note that I only wrote this reply because you tried just about everything you could to provoke a response from me. Normally I'm easygoing and try to be helpful when answering questions here, without sarcasm or denigrating the other person. Now, let's all return to our respective corners and try to behave civilly, OK?

At least with BTECH, you know you're dealing with a real human in South Dakota.

Funny story (since the statute of limitations has long expired) - in the mid-1980's a fellow ham and I drove his lemon yellow Vista wagon (think "That 70's Show") to Ohio, which was the closest place to buy legal fireworks at the time. We picked up an entire car full of commercial-grade ones (packed to above the window lines), put some blankets over them and drove back to New Jersey. Just after crossing the Delaware River back into NJ, the car conked out (again, think "That 70's Show"). We had a bag phone and called for a tow to bring us the whole 60 miles back to Wyckoff, NJ. We kept getting "helpful" police pulling over and asking us if we needed help, and we were "Nope - all good - called for a tow" and showed them (newfangled at the time) Mobira bag phone to distract them. The tow truck finally came and brought us to Wyckoff. We paid the tow truck driver and let him take whatever he wanted of the fireworks as a tip. We had enough to last several years. The second year, 2 friends and I went in a windowless van to see the official Holmdel (near Bell Labs) fireworks show. We thought the official show was pretty lame, and had a van full of fireworks, so... we set up our own show behind the bleachers. The people putting on the official show began to notice that people in the bleachers were looking behind the bleachers at our better show, and eventually some burly guards came strolling over. We packed up everything into the van and took off back to the house in Holmdel. As we were driving away, I remarked to my two friends that "I just realized I've become the person my parents warned me about".

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, and since this is a (mostly) GMRS group of users, I don't know that you'll find [m]any dissenting voices here. I'll just point out that BTECH had working, final BF-F8HP Pro hardware in April 2024 at firmware version 9 when I came on board, and my continuous "here's a bug", "we need to make this better", "we need this new feature" meant that the radios shipped 6 months later at the beginning of October 2024 at V29, including a complete re-write of the menus by me to real US English. V33 was released in the middle of November, 2024 to fix a few bugs we knew about (the radios had to be initially programmed during manufacturing) and we managed to get in fixes for a few user-reported bugs and quite a few user-requested features within the 6 weeks between V29 and V33. V44 shipped in mid-April, 2025 with the CPS 1.2.5m that supports all of the new V33 and V44 features being released at the beginning of June, 2025. V44 and its CPS add quite a few features requested by users and lays the foundation for additional improvements. These radios are updatable by the user, with the same cable used for programming, and any upgrade problems will either be addressed by support email (when possible) or via warranty replacement( (if needed). I'll also mention that nobody has ever bricked a BF-F8HP Pro while updating it (and believe me, I've had many chances as I've done every firmware release from V8 through V44, across 9 radios (ranging from hand-built engineering samples to pre-production units to early production, and then finally a bunch of production units). Many of these firmware features are exclusive to BTECH, either in perpetuity or for various numbers of years. There's no 'generic' version of this radio and there won't ever be. The user-updatable firmware means that a radio you bought on release day, today, or in the future will all be able to run the latest firmware. Even before V29 and the radio's release, I was showing it to select users (it had no labeling except for some marker dots in the battery compartment, and I changed the official boot screen to an actual picture of a boot to not give away where it would eventually be coming from). The universal response was "Wow! A Baofeng that doesn't <bleep>!". Before you dismiss it, take a look at the Release Notes below, which shows what has changed in the firmware between V29 and V44: vers-old.pdf

Baofeng is indeed a place name (in fact, several) in China. Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baofeng_County (although that is 12 hours from the factory). Right around the factory (Changfu Industrial Zone, XIamei Town of Nan'an City, Quanzhou, Fujian province, China) there's also Baofeng Building Materials Hang, Baofeng Printing Shop, Baofeng Household Appliances and so forth. There's also a Dalian Baofeng Machinery Manufacturing Company elsewhere that makes large metal rollers. Here is the scoop on the Pofung business. I don't know what your BFF9 was. There is only one BF-F8HP Pro, it is only available from BTECH, and it went on sale in October, 2024: https://baofengtech.com/product/bf-f8hp-pro/

Baofeng? Or BTECH? Baofeng will private label anything for anybody, as long as they meet the minimum quantity. Baofeng also re-uses model numbers for similar or utterly different products, and many of their products have quite short production lifetimes. BTECH tries to have one product in each market segment, customized for them and available for a long time - you can still buy a UV-82HP from them if you really want one.

They're compatible with the newer full-color screen UV5-family models. BTECH has a cigarette lighter battery eliminator available for purchase now, and I believe an official BTECH extended-capacity battery is coming. But anything from the full-color-screen UV5-family models should work, even if not from BTECH. [Again, not an official position of BTECH.]

Technically, they're "Fujian [Nan’an] Baofeng Electronics Co." The Pofung business was because they never trademarked Baofeng in the US (it is a place name, so it would be like trying to trademark "Miami"). But someone trademark-squatted in the US and it took Baofeng quite some time to get the trademark assignment invalidated and assigned to them. During that period, radios intended for import into the US were labeled Pofung. Any Baofeng OEM customer can request whatever labeling they want (within reason, presumably Baofeng would reject a request to label any of their products as "Motorola"). Some of their OEM customers seem to still be requesting the Pofung branding, simply because it isn't as well-known in the US.

My understanding is that if the radio itself is branded as BTECH, it is contract manufactured for them to their specs (by someone other than Baofeng). If the radio itself is branded as Baofeng (regardless of whether the box only says BTECH), it is a customized model from Baofeng which is usually (always?) exclusive to BTECH. For example, the UV-82HP is a BTECH exclusive, although there are generic tri-power UV-82s. My work on the BF-F8HP Pro (a BTECH exclusive) shows that BTECH is listening to customer feedback (many requests from Facebook, here, and other places) and it has been incorporated into the two firmware updates released so far, with more to come). It is also quite ahead of other analog Baofeng handhelds in terms of features, bug fixes, and programming software (Disclaimer: I write the Windows CPS programming software for the BF-F8HP Pro and co-manage firmware development, as well as dabbling in documentation. However, nothing I post should be considered an official statement of BTECH.) Speaking of the BF-F8HP Pro, if you use coupon code "CPS" at checkout you'll get 20% off (on that model only, and only on the BTECH website, not on Amazon). I should point out that the BF-F8HP Pro is not type approved for GMRS use, but since the equipment reviews rules were relaxed a while ago to allow discussions of non-GMRS equipment due to the overlap between the GMRS and ham communities, mentioning it here should be OK.