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Are those cheap Baofeng radios decent? Was considering getting into this and using one of those as a starting point (to listen at first, obviously, not broadcas
by ablation 8y ago
Are those cheap Baofeng radios decent? Was considering getting into this and using one of those as a starting point (to listen at first, obviously, not broadcast until I've got a licence.)
- Uberphallus 8y agoThey're decent for their price... but you won't hear much, as they're stuck in 136-174 MHz (some AM airband, but the radio is FM) and 400-480MHz (local PMR446, some pager networks operate here). Also no digital modes, and max bandwidth (25 KHz? don't remember) limits what you can postprocess in the computer. Otherwise, they're fine for low bandwidth stuff. They work great as ghetto amplifier for 433MHz applications. To get started I'd rather recommend a RTLSDR dongle, they're under $10 and you can listen (though not transmit) from 24 MHz to 1.7 GHz at 2MHz bandwidth: you can capture images from weather satellites at ~145MHz, scan for weather stations at 433 MHz, various telemetry at 868/915 MHz, airplane tracking, L-band satellites... for some of these things you'll need some sort of filtering and amplifying though.
- ablation 8y agoThanks for the reply, very useful. I have an SDR dongle around somewhere already I think. Are there any entry-level (price wise) handhelds you'd recommend? It's not always hugely easy to carry my laptop around with me sometimes.
- Uberphallus 8y agoIf you have a (rooted?) Android phone, you can use the dongle with an OTG cable. Otherwise, a Baofeng DM-5R should do the job, it has digital modes compared to the cheaper and more popular models. Still limited to FM in analog, which is a pity for airband (where, by the way, you should never ever transmit in).