AmateurRadio.com

The fine weather we have enjoyed for several weeks was forecast to change, so on Wednesday Olga and I decided to take the bus and go for a picnic lunch by Bassenthwaite Lake. For radio entertainment I took the UV-3R (in case of any SOTA or WOTA activations) and the FT-817ND.

HF conditions were pretty dire – WWV has been predicting blackouts – and I initially heard nothing above 20m. But even though I called the loudest stations that weren’t calling “CQ DX outside Europe” no-one even acknowledged my existence. (What’s wrong with working stations inside Europe, I’d like to know, especially when no-one is replying to your CQs anyway?)

The antenna I was using, the Wonder Wand L-Whip, could have been better. It does, however, have the advantage that it is small and light. At the moment I can’t carry much, needing one hand for my walking stick and the other for balance, so everything has to fit in a small shoulder bag. So I didn’t have anything else suitable.

The UV-3R produced a contact with Terry, G0VWP/P activating Walla Crag, the lowest Wainwright, prompting Olga to comment that the small radio was better than the big one!

After lunch I tuned around some more and heard some activity on 15m and 17m. And whilst tuning 17m I stumbled across this. Actually, that’s what I heard a couple of minutes later after I’d dug my smartphone out of my jacket pocket to make the recording using Voice Recorder. What I heard first was ZD8D (Ascension Island) calling CQ. Repeatedly. With no takers. He was not very strong – about S4 on the ‘817 S-meter – with some QSB, but perfectly clear. Clearer in fact than in the recording. I called, but needless to say he didn’t hear me.

As I’ve said before, I have little interest in working stations just to tick countries off a list. But I have a particular interest in the British colonies of Ascension Island and St. Helena as I visited both places during a “trip of a lifetime” in 1999 but have never worked either of them. Just my luck to come across a DX station calling CQ with no pileup when I’m surrounded by mountains and running just 5W to an extremely inefficient antenna!

Today I made a programming cable for the Baofeng UV-3R. Until now I couldn’t be bothered, as the radio is easy to program manually and neither the cost of sending off for a programming cable nor the complexity of building one of the programming interfaces published on the web seemed worthwhile. But it turned out to be very easy.

A few months ago, with other purposes in mind, I ordered on eBay two USB/TTL/RS232 cables. If you search eBay for “PL2303” you should find a couple of sellers: one from Hong Kong is currently selling a single cable with free shipping for £3.99. These are USB plugs with the serial converter built in to the plug. At the other end there are four wires: GND, TXD, RXD and +5V. The logic level is 3.3V (at least mine are) so it can be used directly with the UV-3R. Just solder the appropriate wires to a 4-way 3.5mm jack plug.

The connections (and the wire colours for my cables) are:

• GND (black) – base of the plug
• TXD (green) – first ring
• no connection – second ring
• RXD (white) tip

Cut off the red +5V wire and make sure it doesn’t short out against anything.

In the photo you’ll see that there is something else in the middle of my cable. That’s because I used a 4-way 3.5mm to mini-DIN adapter sold for use with various Yaesu radios such as the VX-1R, VX-3R, VX-5R, FT-60R and VX-150 instead of a simple plug. I bought that at the same time I bought the radio as I thought it might be useful if I wanted to try connecting other things such as a TNC. Plus the simple 4-way 3.5mm jack plugs are a bit hard to find.

Mini-DIN plugs can be a bugger to solder, especially with my hands shaking as they do now. But the inline socket I used today had terminals that would hold the tinned end of a thin wire pushed into it even without soldering, which made the job easy for me.

I tested the new cable with the UV-3R programming software and it worked, so that was a good result.

By the way, I saw on the UV-3R Yahoo group that the free cross-platform cross-radio programming tool CHIRP will soon be supporting the UV-3R. I can claim a little bit of credit for that as I was instrumental in persuading a UV-3R user who had been investigating the programming protocol to share his findings with CHIRP’s author. So soon you’ll be able to upload memories from other radios into your UV-3R.

The weather here ever since I was diagnosed with a brain tumour has been glorious. One of the bitterest frustrations for me has been being housebound, able to do little more than walk slowly to the shops and back instead of going for walks in the hills and activating Wainwright summits as I had planned to do. On Thursday Olga and I caught a bus into Keswick for a day out. I took along the little Baofeng UV-3R handheld in the hope of catching some SOTA or WOTA activators from the surrounding fells whilst I was there. I was pleased to make contacts with Mark MM1MPB/P and Terry G0VWP/P during the day.

I love this little UV-3R radio. It’s so small and light you can take it anywhere and the range of its 2 – 3W on the slim Nagoya NA-666 antenna I have put on it is amazing. It can receive broadcast radio so I can listen to Classic FM or BBC Radio 3 and if someone puts out a call on the 2m FM calling channel the music is interrupted and I can reply to them. The Baofeng is not ham band restricted so I have also programmed in the 8 license-free PMR446 channels and can use it to talk to Olga who has a little Goodmans set that I bought for a tenner on eBay. I can even dual watch between Olga’s channel and 2m channel S20 so I don’t miss anything.

My only niggling annoyance with the Baofeng is the audio volume level, the lowest setting of which is too high so that any station using wide FM deviation – which most folk round here do – is audible to anyone within a 50m radius. There is a mod for this, which involves putting a resistor in series with the speaker, but having tried a small soldering task a few days ago and succeeded only with a lot of difficulty I think that performing the mod would be beyond me.

I know from the Yahoo group that there is not much quality control on these Baofengs and one or two people have had the misfortune to receive radios that don’t work correctly. But for me this has been the best thirty quid I ever spent on a bit of radio gear.

Many people have been buying the cheap little dual band Baofeng UV-3R handheld radios from China. Some people have been pulling them apart, such as Fabrice, F4AVI, who has discovered that it is really quite a state of the art radio.

Fabrice found that the VHF/UHF transceiver functionality is provided by an RDA Microelectronics RDA1846 chip. This is a single chip fully DSP based transceiver capable of covering 134-174, 200-250 and 400-500MHz and supports CTCSS, CDCSS and DTMF with an 8dBm on-board PA. The Band 2 broadcast FM receiver uses an RDA5802E chip, also from RDA Microelectronics, which is a single chip broadcast FM stereo tuner. The UV-3R doesn’t cover the US 220MHz band, of course, nor is the FM broadcast audio in stereo. But future models might well do.

Some buyers of the Boafeng have experienced minor issues with their radios that suggest the quality control is not all it could be. Still, it is interesting to see innovative designs coming out of China. One can only wonder what next?

Many people have been buying the cheap little dual band Baofeng UV-3R handheld radios from China. Some people have been pulling them apart, such as Fabrice, F4AVI, who has discovered that it is really quite a state of the art radio.

Fabrice found that the VHF/UHF transceiver functionality is provided by an RDA Microelectronics RDA1846 chip. This is a single chip fully DSP based transceiver capable of covering 134-174, 200-250 and 400-500MHz and supports CTCSS, CDCSS and DTMF with an 8dBm on-board PA. The Band 2 broadcast FM receiver uses an RDA5802E chip, also from RDA Microelectronics, which is a single chip broadcast FM stereo tuner. The UV-3R doesn’t cover the US 220MHz band, of course, nor is the FM broadcast audio in stereo. But future models might well do.

Some buyers of the Boafeng have experienced minor issues with their radios that suggest the quality control is not all it could be. Still, it is interesting to see innovative designs coming out of China. One can only wonder what next?

Only a few days after I had ordered the little Jin Ma Tong JMT-227 145MHz transceiver from China, news began to appear of a new miniature Chinese transceiver from Vero Telecom called the UV-3R which was a dual band (136-174 and 400-470MHz) transceiver. Eventually these began to appear from eBay sellers under the Chinese brand name Baofeng. The price was an astonishing £25 plus postage from Hong Kong. I ordered one from the seller hk360radio and it arrived in just over a week.

The Baofeng UV-3R comes in a colourfully printed box. Together with the radio the box contains the battery (Li-ion 3.7V 1500mAH), a charger with two-pin socket and adapter for UK mains sockets, two antennas (one for VHF and one for UHF), an earpiece/microphone similar to a mobile phone hands-free kit and a manual written completely in mostly pretty good English. There is also a blue carrying strap carrying the seller’s name which is so cheap and nasty it is unlikely anyone would use it.

Not mentioned in the manual’s list of included accessories but also supplied was a cradle that can hold the radio while charging the battery externally. Why you should wish to do this when you can charge the battery installed in the radio I have no idea. There are no charging contacts on the radio, you have to charge it by inserting the small barrel connector into the socket in the side or by taking the battery out. There is also a short cable with one of these barrel connectors on each end, the purpose of which no-one figured out yet.

The UV-3R makes the JMT-227 look a quality product. This is the first new electronic product I’ve had that didn’t come with a peel-off protective film over the display. The plastic casing is extremely thin and the plastic belt clip that can optionally be attached looks as if it would easily break. To be fair, the flimsiness of the Baofeng may not be due to cheapness but to save weight. The radio is extremely small and very light, just 125 grams (5 oz) with battery inserted and antenna attached.

The provision of two separate antennas for VHF and UHF may be a cost saving measure or it may be for efficiency reasons (a single band antenna is usually more efficient.) However it is not convenient for a user who wishes to make regular use of both bands. The antenna connector is an SMA female, as used by all the Japanese ham radio manufacturers. Frequent changing of the antenna will result in wear of the connector and ultimately a poor contact as the centre pin of the antenna rotates in the socket. Some eBay sellers are now supplying this radio with a single, dual-band antenna. This is something to look out for when buying.

I had originally intended fitting an SMA to BNC adapter to the Baofeng as I have with all my other handheld radios but the UV-3R is so small and light that it seems inappropriate. I doubt that the radio is ruggedly enough constructed to take the stress of using one of the larger BNC antennas in any case.

Confusingly, the rotary switch on top of the radio must be pulled up before it can be rotated. Once you have realized that, the UV-3R is easy to use and easy to program the simplex channels and local repeaters into the memories by hand. There is free programming software available on the web. Programming cables are becoming available to buy on eBay but it isn’t necessary to use the software, unlike with early models of the UV-3R which had very limited menus that did not allow the changing of things like step size or power level except through the programming software. (This is something to bear in mind if considering buying a used one.)

But this radio is evolving rapidly. The manual that came with mine describes 12 different menu settings but the radio actually has 18. Every setting you would want to change can now be set through the keypad. The settings are also stored in the memories – even the selected power level, so that I can have the radio use low power whenever I use it to communicate with my Echolink node. Perfect!

The one thing it does not seem to be possible to do without the software is to program cross-band splits, such as listen on UHF and transmit on VHF. This could be useful for working FM satellites. But I am not very bothered about this.

All the usual RX and TX tones are supported for repeater access. A 1750Hz tone burst is generated by pressing PTT + VOL. The radio also receives Band 2 FM. The quality is not very good, but on the plus side FM reception is interrupted if a signal is received on the currently selected amateur frequency.

The performance of the little radio seemed to be well within spec. On a fully charged battery the output power on 2m was 3W on my QRP power meter. On low power it was 400mW. The sensitivity is also excellent. The box and some advertisements claim the UV-3R uses DSP. As no schematic is available I have no idea. All I can say is that the received audio is very clear and pleasant and that the signal to noise ratio receiving a distant repeater on the UV-3R with its short VHF antenna was better than on the Kenwood TH-D72 with its dual band antenna standing in the same place.

Newer versions of the UV-3R including this one now have an S-meter on receive, though it works in coarse steps. I also checked the strong signal handling performance of the receiver the same way I did recently with my other hand-held transceivers. It was on a par with the VX-8GR and the JMT-227, at the poor end of the spectrum.

The transmitted audio is very good, if slightly lower in level than some of the ham rigs. One local said my audio sounded “just like my normal audio.” The LED on the front of  the radio is supposed to glow red on transmit and green when a signal is received. Mine does not glow red, although the S-meter goes full scale to indicate power out. This appears to be a fault, but not one worth sending the radio back to Hong Kong to fix. However, this perhaps tells us something about the level of quality control you can expect for this price.

I have recorded an audio sample off-air, together with one of the Kenwood TH-D72 for comparison:

• Baofeng UV-3R using built-in microphone
• Kenwood TH-D72 using built-in microphone

The earpiece/hands-free mic supplied with the radio is not useful. I had some trouble with the audio but the main problem is that after you press PTT the radio locks in transmit. This appears to be due to RF feedback into the earpiece/mic cable as it doesn’t happen on the low power setting.

Using the supplied VHF antenna I can access from indoors a repeater 50 miles away. Not bad for such a tiny radio running 2 – 3 watts. Several people who have bought the UV-3R have commented favourably on the performance of the supplied single-band antennas. I tested the VHF antenna and found an extremely sharp response curve with a perfect 1:1 SWR at about 143.5MHz. At 145MHz the SWR was 1.5:1. The antenna has a high Q which no doubt accounts for its surprisingly good performance for its size. It’s a pity the resonant point isn’t exactly on 145MHz but that would be difficult to achieve with a mass produced antenna.

It isn’t perfect, but all in all I am pleased with the tiny little Baofeng UV-3R – for the price. However there are indications that where quality is concerned you are getting what you pay for. If I was a UK dealer thinking of importing a batch to sell I’d think twice. I think fussy British consumers would send quite a few back because of niggling faults like the non-working TX indicator or the problem with the headset/mic. But if you don’t mind taking a bit of a gamble on buying a radio from Hong Kong then the UV-3R would be a good bet for £25.