Ham Radio Baofeng Radio UV-21R Ham Radio Handheld Long Range Two Way Radio for Adults 5RM Rechargeable Walkie Talkies K5Plus with NOAA Weather Receive VOX 999 Channels 771 High Gain Antenna

This is my first ham radio. It looks good, functions surprisingly well, has good quality, decent power, and the range is really nice with line-of-sight. In the city, you might get around two miles of range. It’s easy to use, but like any ham radio, you need to be licensed seed to do anything but listen in. I wish it had Bluetooth to let me use my wireless ear buds and it’s not waterproof so you want to avoid the rain, but very good for the price. Still worth it for an emergency radio and communication device. Would recommend.

The first thing I did with this thing after charging it up was talk to a friend of mine that is six miles away from my house without using a repeater and using the stock antenna that it came with im super happy with this purchase!He said i was blowing his doors off with my transmission!We live in Northern Illinois so the landscape here is not flat at all we have hills and valleys as well as trees and buildings between us so this 6 mile test was not done on flat line of sight land.So for the money I wouldn't hesitate one bit!I liked it so much that I purchased a 10 watt version and did the same thing with it!I will be reviewing the 10 watt one as well.I'm not sure if it says the wattage on this particular unit but I did some research and it's a 5 watt unit.It is made of great quality materials doesn't feel cheap at all.It's programmable from the unit so you don't have to use chirp software.The speaker sounds great 👍It's very customizable light color,sounds,Roger beep Ect..(see the description)The charger base it came with is a great fit!It's not loose in the base at all .And the charger feels like quality materials as well.I don't know how they can sell these so cheap ?But don't let the price fool you these units are amazing for the price!Can you get a better radio?Absolutely. But you're going to pay for the name brand as well as the radio.I hope this helps.(I am not affiliated with baofeng.And I am not paid for this review. )

Great Baofeng. Similar to the 5RM/AR-5RM/K5PLUS family of great cheap HTs but for some reason this one generates more wattage on the 1.25m band. YMMV but I am seeing 8W output on 1.25m, and 8-10 watts on 70cm and 2m (which are excellent numbers for a cheap HT). No other HT that I own puts out more than 3-4 watts on 1.25m (220MHz)ADDENDUM:The only real downside I've noticed is that it does not share battery compatibility with the Baofeng AR-5RM, 5RM, K5PLUS, and BF8HP-PRO (which all share the same battery) and I have a big stack of those batteries. Slight bummer, but the battery it comes with works fine and it is USB-C chargable.

Pretty consistent with the power of 5-6w in the three ham bands and the MURS and GMRS bands.Display needs to be brighter and the font size needs to be bigger like the frequency display is. There's no reason for it to be smaller than the frequency fonts.The center button between the arrows should have been utilized in some way such as an OK button in the menu or maybe a reverse shift of the repeater you are using. Or even as a programmable button would be nice. As it is it's not used for anything.Can't testify about the battery life except for the first night I used it to play FM radio as I slept and that was out of the box and played with it and programming it and it lasted a good 18 hours. I am still cycling the battery in that manner for the first three times to get the best performance I can from the battery.Had to use the UV-17R Pro settings in Chirp to program it.Airband reception would be nice but not really a big deal for me since I have several scanners if I want to do that.The short antenna is junk and I recommend not using it if you want to be able to use your new radio for very long. The AR-771 that came with it seems to be ok even in the 1.25m band but it's not perfect. It's just OK meaning it's SWR in most of the bands were below 3 and mostly around 2 and lower.I like the ability to use the USB-C to charge it but it's not clear if you can use the faster charging that you can use on your phones like the 10W and higher chargers. It just says faster USB-C charging, so I take it as faster than the cradle charger but I don't find any maximum charging rate and don't really want to burn my house or car to the ground for a $25 radio.The audio both transmit and receive is pretty good.The programming on the fly is ok but could be better. Haven't tried the frequency cloning feature but it did pick up my base radio from inside the house correctly.I like the weather radio option but I would like to have seen an alert feature especially since I live in Tornado Alley.If I find anything that I need to update on I will edit this review.