My Range Experience Using Baofeng handhelds

[OffRoaderX]

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[marcspaz]

Great write-up! I love seeing real world results. There is a tremendous value to info like this. That fact that you shared the locations helps, too. We can topology mapping to see what the terrain looks like, which will paint a very clear picture.

 

 

I am super-happy with the results we get with my cheap $25 Baofengs.. I know a lot of people hate them, especially the "experts", but mine do the job - bang for the buck I'd say they do pretty darn good - and if I run it over with my Jeep or lose it out in the desert, it's no big deal because a replacement is so cheap.

I'm with you on this. I have had terrible luck with Baofeng mobiles, but my BF-F8HP is a fantastic, inexpensive ham radio. I love wheeling and I don't want to trash any of my radios, but if i am going to make a mistake with my HT, I'd rather have it be my $28 radio instead of my $400+ Yaesu. Especially when having the more expensive radio brings zero benefits to the table while offroading.

[Lscott]

 

I'm with you on this. I have had terrible luck with Baofeng mobiles, but my BF-F8HP is a fantastic, inexpensive ham radio. I love wheeling and I don't want to trash any of my radios, but if i am going to make a mistake with my HT, I'd rather have it be my $28 radio instead of my $400+ Yaesu. Especially when having the more expensive radio brings zero benefits to the table while offroading.

Some years back I heard a Ham talking to his buddy at Dayton Hamvention one year. He went into the porta-potty. Well his expensive HT slipped off the belt into the big round hole. No guessing what he was shopping for later.

 

[marcspaz]

Some years back I heard a Ham talking to his buddy at Dayton Hamvention one year. He went into the porta-potty. Well his expensive HT slipped off the belt into the big round hole. No guessing what he was shopping for later.

 

 

OMG... HAHAHAHA!!!

[w4thm]

We did one of these tests a while back. UV5R on dual band magmount on a van to UV5R with stock ducky in a pickup. On UHF we got 5 miles on flat ground in rural area. Tried switching between wide and narrow band and it was actually worse on narrow because the baofeng doesn't implement it right.

[Linus]

Knowing hams, he was shopping for a pair of gloves.

[Luish19779]

HAPPY,REALLY HAPPY GUY HERE....

[Lscott]

On 9/10/2020 at 12:31 AM, w4thm said:

We did one of these tests a while back. UV5R on dual band magmount on a van to UV5R with stock ducky in a pickup. On UHF we got 5 miles on flat ground in rural area. Tried switching between wide and narrow band and it was actually worse on narrow because the baofeng doesn't implement it right.

In fact many radios fail in that area, including some of the better ham gear.

The typical short cuts are reducing the drive to the FM modulator to limit the deviation to 2.5KHz, and bumping up the audio gain by a factor of two. The worse part is they still use the same wide band IF filter in the RX path, cost saving, in the radio so you lose the benefit of using the closer channel spacing. 

The more expensive commercial radios do the same but have two sets of IF filters, one wide and the other narrow, to allow use of the closer channel spacing. After all that's why the FCC mandated narrow band in the first place.

Also as some people have noticed even with properly designed narrow band radios there is some range reduction. The attached file goes into some detail on that point.

For range you can use the simplified formula:

(Range to optical horizon in miles) = (Antenna height above ground in feet) * squareroot(2)

This would be for one radio. To get the path do the calculation for each radio and add the distances together.

Narrowband vs Wideband.pdf Radio Horizon.pdf