TerriKennedy

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.

Those are likely Amazon Marketplace listings (look for "Sold by" on the product listing). There are good marketplace sellers and not-so-good ones. I don't know which exact listing you were looking at, so I can't check. A 15" antenna is not going to fit in the standard Baofeng box without folding it, which will damage most antennas except for the "tacticool" tape-measure ones. So the seller would need to provide Amazon with either an oversized box with the radio box inside, along with the antenna, or securely tape the antenna to the Baofeng box and put a "Sold as a set - do not split" label over it. Both are going to drive up the seller's costs (for increased per-unit warehouse space at Amazon in the first case, or for a non-robotic handling surcharge for the second case). You may need to do an "item not as described" return through Amazon. They will likely ask you to work with the seller to resolve the issue, and the seller may try to drag things out, so start the process ASAP so you don't time-out on the Amazon 30-day return window.

There's a company that makes custom lengths of 7/8" heliax to order. Their prices seem pretty reasonable when I looked, but might still break your budget. I'd go with the best cable you can get for the main run. Use whatever connectors the antenna uses (no adapters at the antenna end). Then a lightning protector. Then 400 ultraflex to get into the house and to a base station, or a single adapter to a skinny coax with the matching ultraflex on one end and SMA-F (usually) to connect to a hand-held being used as a base station. My preference for outdoor connectors (and in general, actually) is N connectors. I wrap the completed, tested connector assembly in Scotch 88 electrical tape and then slide one of the heat-shrink tubes from a local Home Depot/etc. underground splice kit onto it and shrink it. That makes it watertight (you don't want water getting into your nice new cable). The heat shrink tubing and hot melt glue inside it will make a watertight seal, and the electrical tape means the connectors won't get gunked up with glue if you ever have to go into that connection again. This way you can upgrade your antenna at a later time without worrying about your cabling robbing power. If you use a commercial installer (not on your budget) you should get a PDF or hardcopy of an SWR sweep across your intended working range. Otherwise you can probably find someone with a SW-102 or similar to give you power and SWR readings. At the other end of the spectrum (pun intended) you can go all-out. My plan is 7/8" heliax from the lightning protector to a 20' mast on the roof, then a DB420-B (if the price ever becomes sane again - prices have tripled and Andrew is quoting 4-5 month lead time) antenna . The ground field is eight 8' long ground rods 16' apart connected with a continuous length of #4 copper and bonded to the power entrance. From the lighting protector to the repeater inside the house, I'll be using 400-class ultraflex. If you were in the NYC area, I'd give you a short reel of LMR600 - I end up with anywhere from 50' to a few hundred feet I can't use, on giant (table-size) reels. This is stuff left over from other RF work where LMR600 is preferable. That stuff is so thick and stiff that I made a walking stick out of an N connector on a length of LMR600. It was the end of the day and a storm was rolling in, so I just put connectors on the too-long cables to connect them to the protector bank. 2 days later I came back and cut the lengths down to the proper size, hence the leftover.

That may be the original 2-line display model. The ones I was referring to are the new full-color screen models.

The original UV-5G or the new UV-5G Plus? If it's the UV-5G Plus, it is the same hardware as the UV-5RH and you can flash 5RH firmware to it to turn it into an amateur radio. There's no known firmware file to flash back to a 5G Plus, so this is a one-way trip out of GMRS land. If you press and hold the [8] key while turning on, both a 5G Plus and a 5RH will say "5RH" at the top, some version, and one of "GMRS", "General" or "Part 97" on the bottom. The UV-5RM will say "5RHBK" at the top. AFAIK, switching General / Part 97 is a "magic salute" on these, except for the 5G Plus which seems to have custom firmware that ignores that.

I run The New JC 700 near the intersection of Kennedy (no relation) and Montgomery. You should be able to find it with search by location. Right now I'm making do with a simple antenna at a lower elevation than I'd like - I had an antenna on order, but the Commscope -> Andrew transition being a complete disaster with prices more than tripling and commercial customers being quoted 4-5 months lead time for standard models. You can read more at https://www.glaver.org/TheNewJC700 which has a link back to my repeater sign-up page here.

Talk to Brent at Cerro Gordo. If you put a repeater on the ridge up there you should be able to make it down to Saline Valley and parts of DVNP and still have coverage to Mt. Whitney. There are 2 commercial antenna sites on either side of his property, but he actually owns the land all the way up to Cerro Gordo Peak (9163 ft).

We don't have roof rights to anything else. We had to pay a one-time charge for the run of the cables across the roof and the roof penetration, plus annual inspection and any necessary maintenance. It is also the highest elevation on the roof (unless we were to construct a tower, which a) isn't needed and b) would be prohibitively expensive). If this was for a GMRS project, then getting additional elevation would have been worthwhile. But for GPS we have a good view of the sky and the cellular extender antenna has line of sight to antennas of several carriers. The L-channel was already there and provided a convenient mounting point for the antenna brackets. The cellular antenna is actually between the two units, while the GPS antenna is attached to the piping side of the mini-split but it comes with an ultra-flex N pigtail which we then connect to the LMR600 and put thick heat shrink with adhesive on the inside over the connection (as we did with the connection on the bottom of the cellular antenna). The unit to the right is top-exhaust and apparently defunct, and our mini-split has the antennas mounted on the inlet side, not the exhaust side, of the coils so they're not getting baked.

It's a trade-off between cost, ease of installation, performance during operation, and a bit of everyone's different opinions thrown in. At work, I ran two 200-foot runs of Times Microwave LMR600 between the roof and our basement office. One was for a cellular repeater antenna (this pre-dated the pre-registration requirement, by the way) and the other was for a GPS antenna. I had to put a 10dB attenuator between the indoor lightning arrestor and the Wilson cellular amplifier or I'd overload its front end. The General Dynamics box the GPS antenna went into was perfectly happy with the GPS signal level. All the connectors were ordered from Pasternack, as were the LMR600 stripper and crimper. I have a leftover piece of LMR600 with an N connector on the end that I use as a walking stick. OTOH, my entire (large) collection of home-use connector adapters cost less than two of the Pasternack LMR600 connectors. It's a trade-off between price, performance, and personal opinion. My repeater is currently using some no-name super-flex 400 (they can't call it LMR because that's a trademark of Times Microwave) to its temporary antenna. If the Commscope / Andrew fiasco ever starts producing antennas again, my DB420-B will be connected to the entry point lightning arrestor using 7/8" heliax with N connectors. My grounding consists of eight 8' long copper-clad steel grounding rods, 16' apart, with one end tied to the electrical service ground. The whole run from service ground to the antenna lightning arrestor is one continuous piece of #4 stranded copper with green insulation jacket except where the jacket was shaved to connect to the grounding post clamps, electrical ground, and lightning arrestor ground terminal. Forgive the non-GMRS pictures, but they do show good (to me, at least) cable installation practices... You can't see the outdoor lightning arrestors as they're at the point where the cables are about to go through the roof penetration.

I'll vote for that, except for handhelds. My nomination for "worst connector ever" is the large NMO. There's insufficient thread engagement on both the inside and outside threads of the large ring, the flats for tightening the large ring are on the wrong side, I have no idea what they thought putting the waterproofing O-ring where it is would accomplish, its impossible to tell if everything has a good connection until you key up and check the SWR, etc. And I had to wait weeks for an NMO to N adapter because I refused to stack a NMO-to-SO-239-to-PL-259-to-N adapter string. I'm actually thinking of changing the VHF/UHF connectors on my DG-503 power / SWR meter from SO-239 to N just to get rid of the adapters. The HF side can stay as SO-239. I'm not sure I'm going to like what I see when I open the case, though. My SW-102 already has N connectors.

To drag this (kicking and screaming) back on-topic.. Right now I have a free "access by request" system (with poor coverage - the best anyone has reported is a little under 7 miles in the NYC area). I'm waiting on an updated antenna (this whole Commscope to Andrew changeover has been a complete disaster, with even large corporate customers being quoted 4-5 month delays on catalog products and even longer for customized ones) and a tower climber to install it and the heliax, plus various incidentals (16 ground rods, cable to connect them, lightning arrestors, so on). Once all that is done, my repeater will still be free to access on request, but if someone wants to make a donation, I'll gladly accept it. My repeater info page will have a link to a secondary page with the actual invoices and amounts for the various pieces of the project, with a total dollar amount. There will also be a list of donations which can be marked either "anonymous" or someone's name and/or call sign if desired, along with amounts and a total dollar amount donated so far. Think of it like the giant "dollars raised thermometer" outside your local volunteer fire department. I doubt I'll recoup 10% of what this improvement project is costing, but it's nice to know that some people care enough to support a mutual hobby project. Nobody gets preferential treatment for donating vs. not donating. To add - donations will not be tax deductible, will be reported by me as "miscellaneous income" on my tax returns, and so on.

I'm not involved with that product (I do the BF-F8HP Pro handheld and the GMRS-RPT50), but BTECH seems to be committed to providing features people request, as upgrades. The BF-F8HP shipped with firmware V29, went to V33 about a month and a half later, and V44 which just came out. A bunch of the enhancements in that firmware were due to requests from Facebook, here, to me directly or to BTECH. So the radio you bought the week it was released in October 2024 can be upgraded to the same functionality as the units currently shipping. The only difference is that new V44 radios will come with a somewhat updated v44 manual which describes the new features. The GMRS-RPT50 got a bunch of features people asked for, like being able to used the microphone to use the radio as a base station, to get rid of the annoying (if you're the only person with physical access to the repeater) password prompt, etc. * Please bear in mind that I'm a contractor working with BTECH, so noothing II say should be construed as the official position of BTECH. vers-old.pdf

That's because you have radios from a vendor who either feels that a) what you got was good enough, b) you don't need to know what was fixed, and/or c) if we deign to provide firmware to you out of the goodness of our hearts and it bricks your radio, tough - buy another one. For a look at what REAL firmware release notes look like, and the sorts of new features that can be provided: vers.pdf