What do you do when rechargeable batteries are dead and you cannot recharge ?
Use it till you are comfortable. Buy extra batteries and a 12v charger. The more you use it the more you'll know how to use it.
Total no nothing here: I've often been tempted but the morse code requirement slowed me down so I'm glad to see it can be avoided...when you guys talk about a whole new world and being well served by having a licence in what sense do you mean? For hunting, camping or other reasons? Genuinely curious! Thanks!
Just adding my 2 cent about the uv 5r.They are great for the price.I d ont think that 5 or 8 watt will make a big differance.The gain of the antenna will IMO make a bigger range improvment over the 5 vs 8w.Still vhf and uhf are line of sight range.For example i was this summer on top of the Whiteface mountain in NY have made contact with my uv 5r and nagoya 771 antenna to Ripon repeater in Quebec it was 205 kms.On the other side it is impossible to establish contact 5kms away with mountain in betwen with the same radio.The only down side of the uv5r and almost all of the chineese radio is when in RF noisy environment the receiver gets oveloaded and they are less sensitive on the rx.On normal urban use with my sr-112 simplex repeater hoocked on the uv5r on a widows of the second floor i reach around 7kms all around at 5w in uhf. Having a ham licence is great ...You can do all kind of things with those uv5r.
you can use "chirp" to program them.there is a link in the program to load local ham repeaters or with a subscription to "radio reference" you can load the frequencies you want.
member : CCFR CPC
For the extend battery pack with 2500mah AA rechargeble i get almost twice the life vs the 1700mha stock li ion.As said up Chirp is good program for those radio.They often come with clone prolific chip programing cable that window will not install the good driver.In general you will need the 3.2.0.0 version.
Last edited by smoktire; 02-25-2018 at 04:29 PM.
Couple things I can think of...
With ham licence, you can operate high power mobile units (VHF + UHF) in your truck, tent, etc. extending your reach considerably.
If anybody at home is also licensed, you can setup a HF rig and talk to him/her while you're outdoors. Last night I had a chat with a ham operating in Battleship Iowa docked in Los Angeles, that would be roughly 2000 km.
APRS allows you to keep an eye on your buddies.
Nowadays, best approach in my mind for certification is to go for Basic with Honours, that is to say you need to score above 80%. That gives you HF privileges with decent transmit power. Later you can go for advanced certification which will give you more frequency range as well as transmit power.