Hi,

I’m not Bob and i don’t play him on TV, but I’ve somehow managed to become Mr. Chinese Handheld Radio Guy. Here’s what I know about these.

If you want “best price”, it’s far and away the Baofeng UV5R, which can be had from Amazon for $29. Yep, really. 

If the information Ed posted about the Wouxuns is correct, it might be well to stay away from it. According to Ed, they all have this small problem where they may possibly lose their memories. I’ve had mine for something close to four years and this hasn’t happened to me. Yet. But maybe you don’t want to take the chance.

I would stay away from either of the TYT radios. I have a TH-UVF9, and it really isn’t as usable as the others are, mainly because important things like CTCSS, deviation (wide or narrow), and step size, are not directly settable from the keypad, meaning you have to set them using up/down arrow keys, and there’s no way to know where you are in the setting. 

Now, for usability, that’s a hard question to answer. Here are some observations that may help though. 

The Wouxun radios time out very quickly when you’re in the menu. So you’d better work quickly, or you’ll have to do your programming over. And by “quickly”, I mean three seconds. Both the Baofeng and the Puxing PX-UV973 take a lot longer to time out. The Baofeng is a good 10 seconds before the menu times out, and the puxing is similar. However, you don’t get any audible warning from the Puxing that the menu has timed out, where you do on the Baofeng. 

All three, Wouxun, Puxing, and Baofeng, allow setting of CTCSS or DCS tones from the keypad. However, the Baofeng and Puxing allow you to directly specify the tone, such as 1862 for a 186.2 tone, where the Wouxun requires that you select from a number list, where, for instance, 36 is 186.2. Setting tones on the Puxing is also a little more difficult, but not by much. I need to hurry up and write the Puxing eyes-free thingy.

The Puxing is the only radio of the three that offers a true dual receive. However, it’s a little difficult knowing which band is active, as there isn’t any audible indication of this. You can work around this by setting the volume of the secondary band differently from the primary band; also, if you turn off the dual receive, you’ll always return to the main band, so you can always get back to a known state. 

All three radios have similar frequency coverage.

The Wouxun and Baofeng keypads are kind of sideways, with ABCD across the top, and 1,2,3,* 4,5,6,0, 7,8,9,# in rows of four. The Puxing has ABCD across the top, and a standard layout 12 key touch tone pad below. The Wouxun has a nice locator dot on the 5 key, but the others do not. 

All of them have drop-in chargers. The Baoffeng has the best battery selection, coming with an 1800 MA/H battery and having a 3800 MA/H available for less than $20. The Puxing has the smallest battery at 1200 MA/H. 1800 MA/H is available from China on eBay if you look. (It might be 1600 MA/H, but what’s 200 MA/H between friends?) All of them have good long battery life, but especially the Baofeng if you put on the big battery, which makes it feel a bit more like HT’s of old.

Oh, one other thing. Programming repeater channels is a bit more convoluted with the Baofeng, requiring that you program in receive and transmit frequencies separately. This effectively means you program each channel twice. Wouxun and Puxing remember repeater offsets just fine. 

All of the computer software is pretty horrible, except perhaps the RT Systems software, which costs as much as or more than the radio itself. I don’t have the RT Systems software for any of these myself, sorry. 

Pricing. As mentioned before, the Baofeng can be had for as little as $29 from Amazon. The Puxing is between $75 and $80. The Wouxun is around $100, but Ed no longer sells it. Lots of others do, though. 

I don’t have much information that’s of any use about the new Anytone AT-3318UV, sorry. Hope to find out more. 

Vy 73, de KB5ELV