I have some thoughts on this. I've purchased 5 Ham radio's in the last 9 months, they are as follows:
Stick with me now ...
1) BAOFENG BF-F8HP - $65.00 radio
2) Quansheng UV-K6 (two of them) @ roughly $30.00 each
3) Yeasu FT-60 - $160.00
4) Wouxun KG-UV9PX - $189.00
So, they're all hand helds, I'll take the $30.00 Quansheng over the Yeasu anyday of the week, especially with the custom IJV Firmware, simply a great radio. But by far at the top is the Wouxun 10w, simply a phenomenal radio.
So, sounds cheesy right? A bunch of cheep Chinese Junk as I hear so often ... Well, these are pretty darn good radios. With my 25ft antenna and a Diamond x30a atop I'm talking from Florida, through Alabama, into Mississippi at 120+ miles. Easily reaching repeaters at 80 miles who then pick up my signal and carry me the rest of the way. I should be able to get 200+ miles (wouldn't it be great if repeater listings listed the tower height?) ... stay tuned.
I submit to you this is the HAM hobby'ist of the future, or really, the present. Now I've personally setup over 30 radio's for folks who have purchased such radio's but don't have licenses for SHTF type stuff. All different kinds through Chirp of course.
These radio's are the ones that are selling in-mass, not the ICOM-7500's, sadly, much of that knowledge is going to fade away as those with the knowledge pass on. Also, we're into Analog, not digital, if I'm going to use HAM over digital I'll say screw that and text you with Signal, why bother, it's not ham, it's not going to help you in an emergency one bit, and it's just silly if you ask me.
There are ton of folks out there that need to know how to use these radios, they are selling an absolute boatload, BaoFeng 4 packs sell like a dozen eggs, I know, I program them for people. It is true the FCC Technician license test scares a lot away, but I do think that is important as we don't want folks using them like kiddie walkie-talkie's. But there are (guessing) 50 HT's being sold for every base station.
These folks are our new base, many if mentored will go on to be the new Elmers and buy those base stations, like me, I will probably literally move out of our wonderful home to buy one that allows towers, that's how much I'm into it.
Here's my saga of late. I'm trying to write some software that makes incredibly easy and fun to learn how to use their HT's and not just to talk 5 miles down the road, but probably 100's of miles. Also, analog is very important is these crazy times, not to mention I live in a major hurricane strike zone.
So, my video's show my software but it was using RepeaterBook data, they denied my request to release the software as I would be a competitor, I was disappointed but not surprised. I kind of felt like that was community data but they are within their right to do so.
So, I'm hunting down Repeater data since I cannot use the RepeaterBook data.
Turns out AARL is useless, they pawned that task off on RTFinder who will gladly give us data for a monthly $ subscription. And where did they get their data? Because it's not out there, the Frequency Coordinator sites are absolutely horrific, many don't even list the offset, not a mention of it. They either dump the data to an HMTL table that you'd have to screen scrape to use and worse. Oh, did I mention the AARL will sell you an out of date book that you and the try to key into your radio ?
Some state coordinators have it together like Florida, this is their listing:
All Coordinated Repeaters as of Sunday 09 June 2024 20:00:01
Did you notice on that link above I can download the entire dataset in JSON or CSV? That's what I'm talking about. They're not trying to control me, to limit me, to gain power by being keepers of the data, they are serving the community.
But the rest are dreadful. Thus, I have been talking to a few Frequency Coordinators that need software, a standard, that hasn't been abandoned, so that's where I have to go first, we need a national standard for every state. This stuff is easy folks, we're talking like one table of data that can be pulled in JSON and CSV formats. This data should be available to all, for free, to do with whatever they choose, whether programming their radio or writing killer software to infuse energy into our Hobby. So that's where I'm going.
Ham radio software is sadly, kind of less than stellar, mostly because it's written by Hammer's who can hack some stuff together, not serious software engineers. You've seen the sites and software.
What we need and I think are going to find is software fanatic's who become HAM fanatic's that re-invigorate the interest in HAM radio. Digital Ham radio, in my opinion, is a fad and will fade away. Analog is and will always be the most important aspect of HAM radio and it's non reliance on the internet.
So, I've said a lot, will probably catch a lot of flack for it, but so be it. The HAM radio community is not sexy, the repeaters and information surrounding them is "owned" or stored in ancient hieroglyphs. There is an absolute unimageable amount of cool stuff we can do. But first, us newbie's are going to have to go build what ARRL and the Frequency Coordinators couldn't build because they didn't have the tech skills, it is what it is. Sadly, this should have been done decades ago, the ARRL really dropped the ball here.
Whiskey Niner
W9ALB
