BAOFENGUV-5R Two Way Radio Dual Band 144-148/420-450Mhz Walkie Talkie 1800mAh Li-ion Battery(Black)

This little radio is extremely powerful and has a great battery life (multiple days of standby power if you enable power saving mode and don't transmit) and it has a removable antenna so you can attach something like a Nagoya, Yagi, or custom coaxial antenna to it.If you buy the extended battery or even just another standard battery, you'll have more battery life than you know what to do with, unless you are constantly transmitting with VOX or you're constantly listening to FM radio with the volume turned up!The stock antenna is pretty good compared to the other more expensive Baofengs, but upgrading to a nagoya NA-771 removes a ton of the faint background hiss on both rx and tx, as well as increasing the tx range quite a bit. From my bench, I couldn't really pick up any additional FM radio stations when scanning through the entire FM range using the Nagoya vs the stock antenna, but what I did notice was that every single station came through crystal clear after swapping the antenna, whereas before it would pick them all up but some stations definitely had poor reception unless I would walk all around the garage looking for a good signal path.It has quite a few nice features but nothing digital, and doesn't have true dual watch monitoring, but with TDR turned on for me I'm able to monitor two frequencies and pick which one I care about more so if they're both active it will let me listen to the "preferred" frequency. It has dcs and ctcss codes for accessing those repeaters, and supports DTMF codes for dialing into Internet relay repeaters or echolink repeaters.As far as ease of use, you will need the manual to decipher the different options in the settings menu. There are some websites out there that give a more detailed breakdown of the menu options and their descriptions, as well as youtube videos to demonstrate more complicated things like programming or connecting two Baofengs to make a mobile repeater. Both of those capabilities require a different cable, not included.Finally, regarding programming, you DO NOT need to get the programming cable as you can do everything right from the radio. If you want to look up different frequencies of your local repeaters and store them in the memory channels, you can do that pretty quickly and easily right from the radio once you learn the flow. Where the programming cable comes in handy is when you want to add a hinge number of pre-programmed channels to the radio, but IMO there is no need for that. I tried it with all the virginia repeaters and found that only 1 or 2 ever had any traffic, even when I would go driving for hours and leave it on channel scan mode. Where I think the programming cable would come in handy is if you routinely traveled out of state (like from the east coast to the west coast) and you had a different set of frequencies and repeaters and settings for each location that you wanted to be able to swap between easily. When you go to the west coast you can just backup your east coast profile to save any changes you made or any new frequencies you saved, and then restore the west coast profile so you're able to make changes and save any new frequencies you find there. Then when you're ready to come back, just save the west coast profile to the computer and restore the east coast profile.

By far the best bang for your buck if you’re looking for a ham radio walkie-talkie or just a weather alert NOAA for severe weather events you can’t beat this for the price. Me and my wife wanted to test the range on this so I had her drive about 3 miles away maybe more to be honest and just using the walkie-talkie with an aftermarket abbree antenna, it worked perfect. I could hear every words she was saying crystal clear. We also used it in the middle of the woods down in the holler of a mountain and it did run into problems with the mountainous terrain, but it still worked. All around this is the best bang for your buck. You’re not gonna beat it! I own four of these and two others that are pretty much the same just at a higher price point.Get the extended battery for it and also get a better antenna the antenna that comes with it sucks

Great product like most all recent Baofeng radio products. Full kit, no making you buy a charger or antenna separately like some companies. That’s really nice. Pretty simple design and set up. I have a UV-5G pair already, so kinda know how to use it, but beginners will find it has a semi-steep learning curve. Nothing a little video research can’t help you figure out though. Time and practice will make it easier too. I will say that I did accidentally try and charge my 5U on the TP5/5R charging base and it didn’t work. Not sure if that’s the case the other way around, but it seems like the chargers are not interchangeable. It does have, like the 5U, an incredible battery life, and obviously if you keep it turned off and when in use, on low volume, it extended that. You can also just disconnect the battery too which is nice if you need to go mute/silent or just want to save AS MUCH power as possible.Features standard things like included earpiece, flashlight, A/B band selector for channel mode as well as other features you can dive into once you get it. Sound is high quality and crisp (as long as the signal is too).

Cheap, durable, good sound quality, great reception for what it is, very light and portable. It’s also easy to program.

Excellent little radio . Took me a second to get it working in chirp ..(just read the reviews the trick is listed by a buyer) after that it was smooth programming