LEIXEN VV-898S vs QYT KT-8900

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RetroBandit

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ok, these are both 25 watt China VHF/UHF radios and I can get them on Amazon in stead of eBay direct from China, costs a bit more, but with all the delays and lost stuff from China I've bought lately I'd rather have them fast then save a some money and maybe see it in 2 months or so.

The question is, of these two, which works better? I'm moving to a small town in a month and want to get back on the air once I'm there. I'm guessing they are pretty even in quality, but you never know. I'll be close to the local water tower, which probably has antennas for something on top of, but no idea what. But being a small town (4k pop) it's probably not over loaded with pagers and junk.

My plan it to order it this weekend hopefully and have it this week.. then I can get it up and running soon as I get moved. the KT-8900 strikes me as a beefed up UV-5R. (I used to have one but sold it when I got off the air around here) If I had the budget I'd go for a name brand rig, but I'm on disability and have to be practical. I'm just happy the new apartment has said they'd let me put up antennas :) I emailed the local club and they said a UV-5R does pretty well from where I'll be into the repeaters. But want something I don't have to mess around charging the battery all the time.

So if anybody that's used both or know them well would give me some feedback it'd be greatly appreciated.
 

k6cpo

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Read the fine print on the Amazon Pages carefully. Not all products listed on Amazon are fulfilled by Amazon itself. Some actually do ship directly from the vendor, a lot of whom are in China.
 

RetroBandit

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Read the fine print on the Amazon Pages carefully. Not all products listed on Amazon are fulfilled by Amazon itself. Some actually do ship directly from the vendor, a lot of whom are in China.

I seen that, and made sure the ones I selected are "fulfilled by Amazon" and Amazon Prime listings.
 

Sconnick

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There's a market for used Baofengs?

;-)

Good luck with the move! Amazon Prime is amazing!
 

RetroBandit

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I thought I do a follow up on my post.
I ordered the VV-898S monday and got it today from Amazon. Spend the afternoon figuring out how to program it (still got to figure more out) but I got the basics down, it works ok, but one weird thing I wasn't expecting. on this newest version of the radio, VFO A and VFO B have TWO SEPARATE memory banks.. Not a huge deal I guess, I just will program VFO A and leave VFO B empty... but at least I came with the programming cable. I briefly tried Chirp to program it, but it seems to open want to access the B VFO bank. What they need is a way to clone one bank to the other for people like me that see no need for two separate memory banks..
 

N4GIX

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You can easily copy/paste via CHIRP to duplicate the VFO A entries into VFO B. This way, you can park VFO B on any single freq you want to monitor constantly, and scan on VFO A.
 
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