2E0VEB

Most radio amateurs, and many who are not, are familiar with the cheap and cheerful Baofeng range of radios. Indeed, many of us who joined or returned to the hobby over the last decade or so have found themselves in possession of one or more of their radios, with the UV5R often being a starter radio for 2m/70cms.

They have a varied reputation, some would say famous, others would say infamous – I guess it depends on:

• Whether you’re a radio snob, or not. A handful may not consider it “real radio” unless you’re using a £6k base station with a 160m antenna over your acres of land. In some cases we hear people with a major issue with anything from “Chyyyna” of course. But fortunately, there aren’t many out there on air, just hanging around the internet making the occasional snide remark to a newbie.

• Whether you’ve had one and if you’ve had any issues. Let’s face it, the UV5R is “ok” depending on your use-case but most of us end up popping them in a drawer and discovering it once every now and again, then popping it straight back. The build quality on many of their radios historically has been variable but competition seems to be helping on that front. Quansheng radios really did throw a cat amongst the pigeons when they launched their insanely cheap and massively customisable radios. I’d say a model number but there are about 500 for ostensibly the same device.

Personally, I’ve got the UV5R, we also purchased some PMR radios a year or two back – four with docking stations for about £30.

About a year ago, my DMR daily driver, the well-regarded TYT MD-UV 380 suffered one-too-many drops and ended up with a broken mic. It’s still good for rx but has been languishing in storage ever since.

As a replacement, i was, at the time, impressed to learn that the Baofeng 1701 was available for about £50 brand new. I figured if it wasn’t up to much, I’d go for a more expensive option and keep this as a fallback. As with the TYT I installed the Open GD77 firmware which I was already familiar with, and managed to get away from the awful stock firmware which reminded me of a cheap and nasty Nokia from the mid to early 2000’s.

Can’t really fault the 1701, It’s a decent radio and does what it is supposed to – for a quarter of the cost of one of the more prestigious brands. The only issue I have is not being able to buy a replacement battery – I always like to have one fully charged for any device. This one sometimes reports more capacity than it turns out to have, which may be the radio or the firmware, but in any event, it is a little frustrating seeing the battery level all over the place during a QSO.

In the end, I happened upon this video from Techminds and bought one on the spot. His assessment of functionality and lack of spurious emissions made it a no-brainer.

The Radio

I placed my order with Banggood and was given a delivery date of mid April 2025. As it would transpire, the radio shipped from China in less than a week and arrived when I had others things to deal with.

Initial observations were good:

Inside the box was  the usual charging dock, power supply, antenna, manual, an earpiece and mic and a belt-holder – as well as the radio itself.
The radio felt solid, rugged although it is a little militarised looking, for my tastes.
The charging dock is at long last, USB C powered – so we can have fewer cables on our desks – and the battery itself has a USB C port which is very convenient – the radio still works when charging.
The screen looks way better than previous Baofengs – including the 1701.

Now i’ve had the opportunity to get to grips with it, I have only one niggle which i’ll get to.

• It supports dual-watch, allowing you to be active on DMR and Analogue at the same time, if you wish. Only one tuner will be active at a time of course.

• Menu options are visible, or not, depending on which tuner and mode you’re in. This was a little weird at first but you soon get used to it – if you’re in analogue tuner and want to change something related to a DMR setting, switch to the DMR tuner! It makes sense but it struck me as quite a good approach by the designers to contextualise the menu options.

• It comes with built-in GPS – something I’ve never really understood from an amateur radio perspective, not sure i’d want to transmit my location to all and sundry, but it’s useful to have none-the-less and it makes use of both regular GPS and the Chinese BeiDou system although you can turn that off, if you wish (why?!).

• The radio can receive airband – the audio is way better than my Uniden XLT 125 which surprised me. The audio is sharp, crisp and clearly understood.

• Audio quality for DMR is also top notch. It really looks like the designers have done an exceptional job on audio processing on this HT.

• The radio can operate as a scanner, within it’s usual ranges. Setting this up is a little fiddly if you want to scan a bunch of channels, but once you master the CPS structure, It is not difficult. I would have preferred their scanlists were longer than 16 entries but I believe you can have upto 32 scan-lists so that should be plenty for most use cases!

• Broadcast FM receive is also built-in and sounds decent enough. It covers a wide band from 76Mhz – 108Mhz – well outside traditional UK Broadcast FM range.

• It has built in SMS and APRS although I don’t use, so haven’t tested, these options.

Overall, this is a very capable, decent radio and undoubtedly a bargain. I would thoroughly recommend it. If you are active in DMR already, It won’t be a steep learning curve, if you aren’t but are looking to buy a new 2m/70cm HT, get this anyway, for the cost difference, It gives you access to DMR which, for me, is one of the best modes in amateur radio.

There is one niggle I mentioned earlier and it’s something of a deal-breaker, or just about – I get reports of low audio, in spite of the mic gain being set to max. I’ve also tested this on the Parrot service and get the same result.

I am having to weigh up whether to send it back and hope a replacement rectifies this or wait and hope a new firmware release resolves the issue. But if it’s hardware, not much chance of that. I think it is testament to the quality of this radio that it hasn’t already been arranged – I want to use it, not wait weeks for it to be shipped back and replaced. For now, some might have to turn their rx audio up a bit – I’m always adjusting my audio on DMR so it’s no hardship. Alternatively i have a series of other mics I can use, so i think, on balance, I won’t waste my time returning it.

The CPS

At present, the radio does not work with Chirp or Open GD77 so we must make use of the stock CPS programming software, which, I find decent, compared to some of the poor quality programming interfaces we’ve seen from other vendors in the past. Whilst some of the terminology strikes me as a bit odd, it is easy enough to work your way through programming this device.

There is nothing too different from most CPS software here, it works reasonably well and has a few additional features which may be of interest. I think they’ve done a reasonable job of producing this – does what it says on the tin.

As always, ensure you are tuned into some frequencies on the radio that aren’t going to receive a signal whilst reading or writing to the device as it is fussy about this – moreso than I’ve noticed with other radios.

That said, I am running Windows in a Proxmox Virtual Machine and passing the USB/Com Port through from the Proxmox host – i don’t use Windows here so it’s better off hidden away in a rarely used VM.

Conclusion

Overall, with a couple of minor niggles, this is a decent radio and one I have no issue in recommending. I have yet to explore the analogue TX capabilities of this radio or finish my code-plug. That said, I tend to experiment a bit with a new device, work out what suits me best and go from there.

The current CPS software can be found here and the user manual (I know!) can be found here. Both links will inevitably change so do check on the Baofeng download page, if these links fail.