BaoFeng Ham Radio From Noob to Skilled in 60 minutes

what is up everybody welcome to the ham radio crash course welcome to saturday how's everybody doing out there i hope very well got a big shout out carlos kd-9oln life at terminal velocity and i just made a parachute mobile contact jumping out of an airplane we just made contact on 14.336 absolutely killer well today we're going to be talking about the baofeng we're going back in it's been a while we're going to do a deep dive we're going to take you from zero to hero and the baofeng so get ready enjoy the memes as we kick things off how do i look how do i sound everybody give me a thumbs up in the chat by look i mean obviously the memes hey what's up everybody welcome to the hamrider crash course i am josh ki6naz i can take these off the theme song is over appreciate y'all coming on uh so what we're doing today is we're going back to the balfang and i thought i would try and go from absolute beginner and then work my way up to some more advanced stuff so we will be covering the use cases how to use it physically the manual programming yeah we're going to talk about manual programming and then we're going to program with chirp and then i'm going to show you a couple of fun things you can do with probably equipment you already have at home so that's what we're going to be focusing on today to kick things off i want to remind everybody the goal of this channel is to pursue inclusivity not exclusivity within ham radio and what we're doing is we're we're starting to take steps to you know put things in our brain to learn more fun stuff about ham radio and then we're applying it so we're going to try it and and i'm really going to focus on that today as we go through this because there is a major point i think people get the balfang and you know they put it on the shelf that we talked about and they don't use it and i want to i want to tell you and explain to you why that's probably not good i'm going to show you a way that you can go about mucking with the baofeng and not have to worry about it okay i'll say first and foremost everything that we're going to cover right now even though i'm going to be using a uv5r will apply to most chinese radios most baofengs and hey yeah i got my old cycling hat on uh to remind me of you know two years ago when we started doing these live streams i thought it'd be fun to do that this is a live show right so this is a live show and i'm streaming this live so if you're watching this after the fact i've added chapter markers at the bottom to help you jump to exactly the spots that we're going to talk about and i will be covering the agenda and a little bit here so you know exactly what you're looking for because it's possible you don't need that beginner stuff and you just need the latter half stuff so hopefully that helps i don't have a lot of time i appreciate i've locked myself to 60 minutes we may run over and i do want to try and answer your questions but if you still have questions at the end of this there's a link in the description for our discord the hamridge crash course discord and that is where you can go after the show we do a live stream or a live chat afterwards we will take your questions and answer them as they come in uh i did get a super chat from matt schroebel thank you so much matt i appreciate it let me go back up oh it was just the super chat no question there okay thank you very much i appreciate that what else uh the amazon list will cover all the things that i'm gonna talk about on the show you don't have to buy from me at all or buy off of amazon i don't care i just do that to put them in one location i will make a shout out for the signal stuff signal stick which is linked in the show description that antenna goes to support hamstudy.org so if you got your uh pam radio license from hamstudy.org you may want to consider picking up one of those antennas because it's probably one of the best antennas for the baufang or any hd you own okay that's my opening little bit that i needed to cover so let's cover one thing of news because i do really have a lot we got to get through here um two things actually the first is we've already got a fangang lineup so if you're a fang user and a fang lover of the baofeng over on hamtactical.com which is our our merch store for the hammer new crash course my wife runs this and creates the designs we already have six different well basically six different designs for the baofeng i personally like i've got to abri which is a throwback to freddie mercury and the abri antenna which you probably know all about second we're gonna probably talk about this on the after chat so make sure you do join us over there there was a short movie that was released called or short film called night and it was a camp hollywood 2021 film that uh features ham radio and there's actually the shot right there of the young boy with a with a ham radio actually he's got a handheld it looks like a ft60 a yaesu and then he's got an hf looking radio in the background and considering the frequency i think that is true anyway we'll probably watch it in the after chat so if you're interested in that please do join us i'm also going to live stream to twitch as well okay so where are we starting off with all this a little bit of uh some talking points to cover here baofeng zero to hero in 60 minutes that's my goal this is the agenda okay so we're going to cover baufen controls powering on basically all the exterior controls and the scan feature how to use it accessories we're going to talk briefly about antennas batteries and cables that i think you should get the most important settings which is two settings are the most important settings and everything else makes the baufeng just a sandbox that you can play in we're going to do common use cases for programming we're going to start out easy and then we're going to work our way up the manual programming way we're going to do simplex repeaters and satellites which is satellites is the most complicated case in a small niche but a very cool niche and we're going to talk about computer programming and i'm going to do a raw chirp install i've uninstalled it from my computer we're going to reinstall it and i'm going to show you exactly how to do that as well we're going to talk about the ftdi cable the chirp install and how to use device manager to make sure you're connected to the right cable because that's where a lot of people get stuck with and then the two funds stuff the real expert side of this i'm going to show you how to do sstv over a balfang and also aprs via a phone and tablet combination arthur hernandez w6 her says enjoying the videos thank you so much so before we kick this off uh i saw this bottle of wine kicking around this is a charles shaw if anybody knows what the the street name for this is it's two buck chuck and i thought what a what a better bottle of wine to drink uh while we're doing a little uh baofeng video so cheers to everybody thanks for coming out i really do appreciate it all right a couple of more slides and then we'll get right into it what about thing is it's an amateur radio it is an amateur radio um clas technically classifies as a commercial radio but generally the ones you buy particularly if you get a uv5r the 25 job off of amazon then you're looking mainly as a ham radio it works 2 meters and 70 centimeters which means if the frequencies that you're trying to listen to like first responder frequencies for a scanner or something like that don't start with something with like a one and a three with a high number or like a one three eight or a one four four or a one four five one four six or four forty or up 446 and up from there it's likely that um you're not going to hear them so let me just get that out of the way i'm i'm thinking in my head of all the questions i've gotten on baofengs and that's one of them why doesn't this work on 800 megahertz 900 megahertz etc because it's a two meter and 70 centimeter only radio that's what it does so there's the one it's a line of sight radio meaning you basically have to be able to see the thing you want to talk to obviously foliage and height from ground and height to the person you want to talk to is going to change how effective it is but you basically will get 1 to 10 miles out of it when talking radio to radio and again all those things apply buildings foliage all that stuff keep that in mind if you're having a hard time making a contact with somebody try switching from 70 centimeters to 2 meters and vice versa what's it another thing that it is it's cheap the one we're talking about the uv 5r just the standard and basically the one i recommend there's another video i did on things to do or things to know before buying a baofeng uv5r is where it's at it's 25 you don't really need to spend 65 to get some kind of souped-up baofeng unless you need one that truly can take a dunk in water and stay there for a while that would be the only exception i have to it and it's effective with the caveat for its price it is a cheap radio it behaves like a cheap radio and just keep that in mind you're buying something that's relatively inexpensive what about thing is not a reliable radio to reach people 50 or more miles away without a repeater or some kind of a lot of help like a really nice tower with uh with an antenna on top of it that you can use to get your power out there remember it's a handy talkie and at best you're gonna see five watts out of it in reality you're probably gonna see only like four watts out of it okay that's the power output of a baofeng as they generally are about four watts for most of the different types when i'm saying baofeng i'm going to repeat myself here balfang is a singular term to imply most chinese inexpensive radios when you start to crest the 100 dollar mark particularly the 150 mark then the chinese radio's quality goes up considerably like a lot of the wushan radios that are all above the 150 range for the good ones those are good chinese radios they put out more power you get the idea ham radio pen pals uh cine superstar thank you so much for the fangang w-2 raf paul g how's it going paul thank you so much it is uh it is not a high quality radio you're paying 25 i hope everybody can understand that there are some people out there that talk about how the balfang is the best radio i think what they're really saying is it's the best radio for 25 or under 40 or along those lines so do keep that in mind when you hear someone point you to the direction of a bowfang it's largely because they are unsure if you're gonna fully dive into ham radio and there's nothing worse than telling somebody oh yeah go buy this 200 300 400 radio in some cases and then you not really like it and then what do you do well you know we've lost you to the hobby so sometimes it's a lot better in the long run that you just go ahead and buy the 25 radio and then you can just upgrade later and gift that 25 radio off to somebody that you bring into the hobby right pay it forward with bow fangs it's kind of the line um japanese radios in general are better the japanese radio handhelds are going to perform better so just so you know getting started even a cheap one cheap cheap japanese radios start at 65 for the yaesu ft4x but that has a lot in common with a baofeng you can see my review on that where i talk about it but just keep that in mind what about thing is also not is an rf clean radio and i know we're starting at the base level so i'm only going to give you a high viewpoint of this most balfourne baofengs is another proper pronunciation for it um put out unintended harmonics when transmitting and what that means specifically is if you're transmitting just this little f fm portion right you're modulating fm right this little space and you're transmitting it 146.520 which is the united states or of the americas simplex calling frequency north america then you could be putting out noise and tones interference on a much wider space and they look like little spurs and they're called harmonics cheap radios generally lack electric filtering or harmonic filtering to prevent them from doing that so that's where a lot of people get upset about bell things is from that point but just keep that in mind okay so let's slide over here we're going to look at the baofeng and get things started and we'll we'll come back to the slides in a little bit here so let's take a look at the controls for the bow fang as it were all right here is my uv5r it has the extended battery on it which you can probably see all right how's my focus looks good okay on the top is going to be your your volume control and your power on knob so i'm just going to power that on right now which you can just do one-handed you get a human voice that probably comes back to you and says hi there is a call button on the side this is almost entirely not used if you hold this down it will emit a tone actually transmit that like an emergency um alarm it serves no good purpose i don't recommend it ptt button is on the side that is push to talk so this is literally like a walkie-talkie device right as a kid um you starting out when you were when you started out when you started out as a level one child um you might have had a walkie-talkie but if you push this it'll transmit so i can say like ki 6naz radio test and so i've just transmitted and that little light told me when it turned red that i was transmitting on the right hand side there is a button that says money can you see that money and it's the monitor function if i hold it down it turns off the squelch sometimes you may need that if you need to hear people way down in the noise on the right hand side there is a speaker and mic flap here and that's literally what it is it's the audio connections for the speaker and the microphone this is also the jack that you use when connecting to your computer or an audio device which we will talk about in the front of the radio there is a vfo mr button and by the way this layout is going to be very similar to other radios chinese radios that you may see out on the market okay there will be a vfo and mr button or it may just say v and m if you click it it may say frequency mode and if you click it again it'll say channel mode and you can see a little number popped up when it went to channel mode this radio has memory channels built in which means we can load common used frequencies onto those memory channels for use later so in this case i have a couple loaded that's a local repeater and that's a simplex calling frequency 146.520. and that's something else i was playing around with anyway you get the idea okay the a and b button brings this arrow from the top left here to the top bottom or the left bottom and that just switches the transmission a and b channel this is called the a channel on the top and this is the b channel on the bottom so now we're in control of of this channel see i can push the up and down button and i can scroll through them menu brings up the menu exit exits out of the menu but if you're in the menu you can use the arrow keys to go up and down the different menu options and there are 40 options on a standard baufen now i have a video that covers these menu items in greater detail so do check that out if you are interested scott 75 thank you for the super chat went with the 556 uh a connoisseur of uh of a particular caliber up and down arrows again change frequency the numeric pad is used for keying in a frequency so if i wanted to in frequency mode remember i click the vfo so i'm in frequency mode i can go four four six and that's the 70 centimeter calling frequency that we can just leave set there for a little while i'm gonna mute lower that a little bit okay now next to all the keys are these screen printed buttons that say things like step and txp and save and scan vox etc etc so if i if i go back to menu and i hit that button it should take me to the step if i go to transmit power or txp that should there it is uh txp there it is and if i go to timeout timer there it is again so you may have to click it twice but it should take you to the thing that you're looking for tot is the timeout timer let's go really fast since we're on let's go back up to the a channel 146.520 and let's say i want to just listen for frequencies that are out on that on that frequency or in this this two meter band i'll hit the scan button which is right there oh i i might as well show you what that sounds like so if i hold it down see if you can hear it and it'll start scanning so it's literally going up the frequency space and it will stop wherever it hears uh an appreciable signal that breaks the squelch that's what it's looking for we're likely not going to hear anything because i'm literally connected to the stock antenna right now so it's probably not going to pull much in but we can change that over at the end of the video if we have time and we can talk about that scanning is going to be at least one i feel is one of the most powerful things you can do particularly if you're new to an area or this is your only radio and and you really just use this to kind of poke around leaving this on scan in frequency mode is often the best ways to find new repeaters or people that are talking on a particular frequency that you didn't know about it's incredibly handy what you can do is scan is you can go back into memory mode or channel mode but that's what mr stands for memory and you can scan again [Applause] and then what scan will do is it will scan through the memories that you have loaded so let me scroll in so you can see the the numbers there now you can see them see how it's there's only a couple of memory channels there's a one and we'll wait until it does again two and then like 124 or something like that so it'll just keep scanning through them so if you have a lot of repeaters loaded you use the scanning function to uh to do that that's the best way to go about it when you're receiving something you'll get a green light that turns on gives you a warning that you're receiving or a notification or the backlight will turn on but that's also controllable inside the memory okay here is the most important thing you can know about the baofeng ready this is the most important thing and this is going to free everyone it's going to free you from any kind of worries that you have about this radio go into menu well you got to get off this frequency first there we go menu we're going to go to let's just go to zero and we're going to go down one from zero to reset all i'm going to reset this radio right now we it when you click menu it drops into all you can change that from all or vfo no you're going to do all and you're going to say source yep click it again i just reset to factory this radio now it's in uh chinese okay so you're probably like i don't want that in chinese so here's the second most important uh setting that you have oh that's not what i want okay menu 14. there we go right in there menu 14 is your voice change you can change it to english or you can turn it off completely which some people do because then it just doesn't matter and once you know the system then you don't really need to hear the voice anyway and depending on where you're at um you may not want to have all these beeps and boops going on chris c thank you for the super chat with the fangang hashtag fangang thanks i appreciate that so that's the most important uh setting is just feel free to to bash this thing around and go into the menus and figure out what they're all about this does come with the manual it's pretty poor i will show you a website here in a little bit that will give you more information i recommend you do go ahead and download a good copy of the manual and get to know some of the settings you don't really need to know much about all of them but it's handy regardless so here's the first thing we're going to do we're going to do a simplex programming but before that i want to explain what simplex is so let's back to the slides for a second all right so simplex is that little man a blue man is on top of a mountain and he has a radio maybe it's a bell fan maybe it's another radio doesn't matter and you've got a baofeng and you're down there the little green guy in the lower hand corner i have two frequencies listed there they both should be loaded in your radio 146.520 and 446.000 megahertz you should program these on your zero and one channel or one and two channel of your bowfangs this is walkie-talkie communication so for everybody who asks what's how do i get these radios to talk to each other you set them to the same frequency that's it you just set them to the same frequency and you program it in and then you say hey you get all your friends together and you have a baofeng programming party and you program your bow fangs so you set them all to the same frequencies make all your memory channels the same and then you just tell everybody if there's ever an issue where we need to talk hop onto memory channel 2 and we can start talking there jeff for the super chat thank you so much he says thanks great info appreciate it jeff and thank you for the super chat so that's what simplex looks like simplex is literally talking on the same frequency so programming it on the balfang is pretty straightforward and i'll show you that right now all right so we're going to program two meter simplex right into this we are not in memory mode if we were it would it would yell at you and then it had the little numbers on the side so get out of that so we're going to set one four six five two zero on the a channel so we have the a b on the a channel because the arrow is pointing up then we're going to go into menu and we're going to go up two i think it's 23. memory channel 27. so i'm going to type in three zeros you don't really have to do this but okay so we're going to exit out of that so now you see oh wait one one three six dot zero two five is still listed there that's not right so let's go back we're gonna go one four six five two zero and we're gonna go back into menu and we're gonna hit menu again and we should have it loaded now oh no this is that zero channel problem um okay so part of the problem with this is and let me go back a step so i can show you the zeros don't the zeros don't line up with um with any particular channel so you can't type something in go back go back go back there we go so let's go into that menu if you type zero c doesn't really do anything right but if you go zero zero one oh okay so let's just zero that out and it should have worked that time no it didn't i hate that that's one kind of bug about the radio so what you can do with this and i generally sort this out with uh with programming with the software is you just go back into the memory 146.520 go to menu channel and you type in zero zero zero one basically is where you want it to go and then you save it there so now you've got 146.520 on channel one and if i transmit kilo india six november alpha zulu test you saw that we transmitted on the same frequency just like that so that's your walkie-talkie frequency if you wanted to make your own custom frequency that you want to use that's fine you can you can do that too and that'll that'll get that to go so that's simplex simplex is just walkie-talkie comms something that you may use when you're in the field you get the idea i hope you get the idea let's go back to the slides really quick and we'll talk about so that was the the noob um the the zero uh phase is just go ahead and manually program in a simplex frequency what if you have something more complicated what if it's a repeater well what's a repeater a repeater is a radio that is simultaneously receiving your transmission from your radio again you as that little green person and transmitting at the same time or basically the same time exactly what you're transmitting out on a slightly different frequency that frequency difference is called the offset and it's usually represented by a negative or a positive identifier in this case this repeater receives on 146.970 and it transmits at negative 0.6 megahertz but it also requires something that's new that you may not know about it's called a sub-audible tone in this case it is the 136.5 hertz sub audible tone so to program that manually we're going to have to go a couple of steps further and thank you all for my artistry i really appreciate it uh that what can i say what can i say i as long as it conveys the message that's all i care about the carries thank you for the 357 it's my favorite caliber uh thanks making kc6 clc laugh she's rehabbing knee oh knee replacement oh man don't laugh too hard hurt that knee appreciate it the carries thank you so much okay so for a repeater that means we're going to have to have a transmit and receive frequency right we're going to have to have both we accommodate that by setting the receive frequency on the frequency display and then setting the other stuff and i'll show you what that looks like so let's go over to it now all right so we're still in memory mode we need to get out of this so we're going to go over here again we're back in frequency mode so what was that repeater i missed it oh it's uh one four six one four six nine seven zero nine seven okay that's the receiving frequency right i've already mentioned that well we got to get a little bit more going there because if i just transmit it on that frequency it's not going to do anything that's the frequency that everybody is listening on when they're tuned up on that frequency so we're going to go into menu we can't save yet because we don't have what we need in we need to have an offset so in the offset case what was the offset it was 0.6 megahertz so we'll go into that we're going to go zero zero zero six zero zero zero so that's that's just six uh point six megahertz is what we're displaying there well how do we get the positive or negative pretty easy go to no get in there go to sftd and we want it to go negative you can go pause it if you needed to but in this case it's negative and then we hit menu to confirm okay now we're going to go to sub-audible tone that 136.5 hertz sub-audible tone where's that at well it's down from 25. okay and where is it there it is we're going to transmit a ctcs tone and it is 6136 so we've got to go up and these are specified hertz right these are tones that are standardized to a point so 136.5 should be listed exactly here 136.5 there it is so we're basically using frequency mode to set all the characteristics of the radio to transmit into this repeater if we go back there we go we now have 146 970 mentioned with a negative offset and if i key this radio we see it steps down dot dot 3 and there's a ct kilo india 6 november alpha 0 radio test we see a ct in the left-hand corner to denote that it's putting out a ctcs and the negative denotes that it's going to step down the amount of step down in megahertz is going to be depicted based off that frequency we set and you can see it when you transmit it literally steps down 0.3 from 0.9 there you go we like it it's working okay great let's lock it into memory well where do we put it so let's go back to 27 and you can type it in the keypad memory channel for just the heck of it let's put it into our memory slot 2. there you go slot 2. you could have just typed 2 but i'm i'm being dramatic and that should have been it so let's back out let's go back to memory mode we now have one four six nine seven zero listed on slot two and we should be able to see it step down three with a ct showing and there it is let's see if we can get a little closer there so you can see that ct showing and by jove we've got it so there you go so that's a repeater programming relatively straightforwardly and simplex programming um by hand okay nice well let's uh let's take a a break from that action because now you've got repeaters and you've got your simplex set up so now you can start talking to people well that's where i want to talk about some accessories and then we'll go into some of the more advanced stuff and i'll show you computer programming a lot of questions i get is what antennas that i should get for the baofeng so again this is a noob or zero to hero so i'm only gonna cover the exact stuff that i recommend and that i think are important and nothing else so bluetooth dongle no we don't need that get that out of here antenna wise you basically have three choices that i recommend and um they're going to be of varying sizes depending on what you need the signal stuff signal stick is all relatively the same size the hrcc style is the orange one or the glow-in-the-dark um unofficial it's not like i'm branded with them or anything i like the glow-in-the-dark one personally i go with the bnc type they do sell bnc adapters and they look like this this bnc adapter replaces the antenna connection just like that and there you go so you can snap on a bnc antenna but you know whatever in this case we're just going to use the the stock antenna because uh we've got some fun stuff we've got to do in a little bit with another radio okay so from here um you could do the abri that's your choice they come really long as well the other thing recommended if you want a little bit more battery life or you want the ability to field charge because the problem is these radios they come with these drop-in chargers like this guy right here that's the drop-in charger there is no there's no space to charge these on the body of the radio you can only slap it into a drop-in charger unless you go with the extended batteries they have a dc port on the side and they make usb cables and ac adapters that will plug into these and charge them and you could use something like a usb power bank to do it watch the green change so now we're charging okay so you could charge in the field that way you could make up your own little cabling solution or you could have a solar panel that has a usb output and you're good to go using the external battery unless you're modifying something to do a specific charge task is the only thing that i know of that will do that as cleanly so do keep that in mind um as you're thinking about kitting out a baofeng if you decide to do that because it's still relatively cheap uh there are plenty of speaker hand mics that are available on the market but i'm not the biggest fan the next thing though and this is i argue the the most important thing is um the programming cable there's only there's like one programming cable i recommend now it's this mirror kit one because it's a like a six in one it has all these little leads that snap off from the end to do multiple radios so you can actually program um yesus and wushuns and kenwoods and obviously baofeng and baufeng derivatives with this kit it's linked in the description in the amazon store so check that out if you're interested otherwise just use what you want but the key point here is this logo right there can you see that where is that logo come on buddy enhance there it is that's the logo for ftdi you sure as whatever can use the the programming cables that come with balfangs i never recommend people buy those cables i recommend you buy the ftdi cable and the reason for that is they plug they work with anything they work with whatever computer you have there are some exceptions and that we'll talk about briefly uh but they pretty much work with everything so that's the way i go is ftdi it's plug and play and you're good to go all right so that was uh that was the programming step so once you have that you now have the ability to transmit on simplex or a repeater and you'd basically take your phone or computer or whatever and pull up something like repeater book and search for different repeaters in your area which we've talked about on other videos so let's talk about that programming while we're at it here let me go back to me all right so hopefully you're following along uh as we're as we're doing this let's make sure i'm not missing anything yeah we're good okay let me get that website back up hold on i lost it all right so repeater book is where i go repeaterbook.com and you can do proximity checks like where you live based off of your city um or your zip code this will become more useful as we start playing with chirp here right now basically but just wanted to let you know so talking about chirp chirp is the software that we use to program a lot of different radios including some japanese radios we use chirp to do it it's free software and this is the website it's linked in the description it's chirp.dan planet.com if you click on the get it button and again we're doing this we're doing this straight from zero to full on because i get a ton of messages i basically become i.t support for people that don't know how to get software to run on their computers so you click on click to download latest windows version and then there is a click to download latest mac os version and yes this runs on mac os as well and linux users they have a version as well but you can use different distros to pull i think it's still apt-get or whatever get i think because app got to pre deprecated but whatever click on uh wait the latest windows version and there's generally a daily they have a daily build that they push out and it's a exe file so i have it already downloaded here it's in my download folder so i'm going to pull that up really quick i'm just going to click the dot edx i'm going to try oh okay that's the admin check you probably can't see that but that was my computer going into admin mode to do the install if your computer doesn't do that you might want to go to your downloads directory right click on the download and say run as admin that will solve a ton of your problems but you should you don't see it do you oh oh that's why hold on there we go so now you should see it so here's the installer and here's something that's very vital that we're going to use in a second here's the installer we're going to start the process so just click next uh this is the general license agreement if you want to read it go ahead click agree it's going to load in your chirp directory off of program files for windows we're doing this for windows i appreciate that that's not going to be the same for everybody i found it works really well in mac the only thing that you have to do in mac which may be different for some folks is that you have to go into your system preferences as a mac user i'll tell you what to do you have to go to system preferences and then security and there should be a little box that says you tried to run chirp and it's downloaded from the internet not approved you want to approve it you just click yes and you click accept and it'll it'll do it that's all you gotta do um okay chirp has been installed on your computer i took a big gamble on that i was kind of worried that it was gonna say you need to restart your computer which is like uh dog now we're in now we're in big trouble so we're done we've installed chirp that's all it should do but the next thing is where people get all caught up so i'm going to run it right now i'm going to run chirp you're going to see it live i'm going to pull chirp up right here chirpy chirp that's it it's just a blank screen ah but where is the where is the the curiosity come in let me grab the programming cable okay before i plug this in and before i do anything with chirp in fact i'm actually going to close trip out so before you start chirp do this um go in close chirp bring up your not available that is the list of all your plugged in ports right now and i've got a ton of them but what you'll find is when you take your cable you should see a new port pop up because this is actually a device the device is this guy right on the end so i'm going to plug it into my computer right now and we should see a new port appear so make sure you're watching right there you know it's usb when you plug it in three times always takes three times okay it refreshed and it says oh we've got the same number of ports but now there's a new guest here on the bottom this port 13 usb serial port you should see a new port plug-in when you plug in your ftdi chip that is that is how it works so now i'm gonna grab my radio here my radio is turned on which you might not be able to see that because of the green screen yeah you can't see it trust me it's on plug it in here's the second thing people get screwed up on so we know now port 13 is what we're going to use for com port the next thing is these are not standardized the widths here and the widths on the cable can vary so when you go into this radio for the first time you may have to push in really hard and do really go in there and check that you get a really good seated purchase and it should be very close i'll get it on camera when i'm done with the programming all right so now we can start chirp all right trip is up can i do something cool here no i cannot that's not a long enough cable never mind all right let's go to radio download from radio we know it's not com4 you can't trick us it's com13 and it is a baufang and again all these different types of all these different companies midland redavis rugged radios is on there tid radio tyt you get the idea a ton of radios on there any tone so let's go to balfang and we have a simple baofeng uv5r and we hit okay and it's flashing that's it we're we're downloading from radio guess what half of the problem is over now i know i've covered baofeng programming videos with chirp the fast way and i still recommend doing it that way i'm not going to try and recreate that or break my record or anything like that but you can see there are three are our two channels that we loaded and that one that got screwed up on the zero channel if you want to correct that and i apologize for this not being very zoomed in you may not be able to see it as very well but i'm just going to go in and go 146.520 and hit enter we want tone none no duplex we're in fm mode and i want high power the next one i'm going to make 446 oop no i'm not that also happens with the programming software go in there and double click double click the field 446.000 and i want the name to be 70 cm i want no offset no tone and transmit on high and then i want the next one we're going to set with with different repeaters so we set the two to the simplex frequencies if you'd like to add your buddies you know simplex frequencies that you guys use that would be the time to do it at this point is how i do it is i usually put my simplex frequencies at first and go down exp uh k k i m a z nathan asks explain why download first template format um so the reason why i download from radio first is it opens up the radio settings and that's the settings and the programming for the radio so you download off of that build upon that and then you know when you upload it back to that radio it's going to accept it because it came from that radio at least that's always been my uh my oh he met i meant upload nathan you i expect an email apology on this one i'm just kidding um so he said explain why download first template format i mean upload from just keep watching anything we'll get to it so load your simplex frequencies is what i recommend and then at that point you could load um some of the templates that are pre-loaded we'll talk about that at the end but let's go back to talking about repeater book so if you go to radio and you go import from data source you don't want a query from data source you want to import from data source at least that's how i use it you may do your own thing go to repeater book and do proximity query um i changed my mind you want political import and you want uh repeater book political query is that right yeah that's what you want okay i found this to be the most useful so i'm gonna go california sure los angeles county two meters hold on dear hold on to all your butts there we go so how many do we have in cal in in los angeles county california how many repeaters 81 repeaters there are some blanks that we'd have to sort out but let's say i uh let's say sure let's go all uh and we're going to go auto auto number is very important because it's gonna try and reserve this five space it's just gonna leave blank space so make sure you hit auto and it now will number from zero one two three it'll skip five go to four five six and keep going all the way down so let's just take them all and we'll sort it out on the back end however we don't wanna start on zero we wanna start on uh two because that's where the next open frequency is so you hit plus one plus one so it's two channel 2 and we hit ok so now boom there you go all the 2 meter repeaters are there so now you're good to go and it goes exactly to 79 channels now pretty straightforward jiffer sends a super chat not all pcs will recognize the usb cable you may need com drivers from the device m1 macs weren't supposed uh weren't support won't support this app dongles won't work because signals okay so jiffer you got a good point but but uh the m1 is an arm-based processing and so yes it trip needs to be updated however for all you windows users i don't want to miss this because i do have this up for a reason um if you go to a website mclore and this is linked in the description so we're talking drivers again i've gone back a step we're going to talk usb drivers because i skipped over this too quickly this website is really really handy for all kinds of different manuals that you can download you can go to reviews you can pull up different models reviews and supporting information for whatever but if you scroll down you will see later the programming software where is it download antennas uh drivers and software so if you go to drivers and usb cables when you're here this is going to talk about ftdi chips wc chipsets sill lab prolific which is what a lot of those baofeng dongles are but if you go up so you bought yourself the mirror kit dry the mirror kit cable or you have an ftdi cable and you go to correct driver under ftdi chipset that will take you to the ftdi website which is this guy right here and from here you can download the virtual com port drivers for windows 7 and windows 10. there's also windows 11 apparently for desktop and then you also have direct drivers that you can use for d2xx but i don't exactly know what that is at least off the top of my head so if you click there it'll download the actual setup file to run it now you will likely still may have to go down in here and actually click the one you need so here's the operating system windows and i have a 64-bit processor in my computer um so i'm going to download the version 2.12.36.4 that is what you would use if you plug in the cable and you don't see any activity that's where you want to be that's where you go is you just go to this link and the link is in the description for that too so make sure you uh check that out if you need to okay so there is a little bit of a side track but that was a good one thank you for mentioning it so back to my chirp here my chirp programming i've got empty slots from 79 down so i'm going to go to radio import from data source again go to repeater book political query we're going to keep it in los angeles but i'm going to now go to 70 centimeters and click ok so now how many do we have here oh my gosh we've got upwards of 190 listed so we want all but we're going to auto number what does that change us it only gets us 160. so that's not going to work right we've got oh boy that's a that's a ton of extra repeaters so let's chain this around a little bit we're going to go back to repeater book import from data source and by the way if that works for you because you only have like 30 repeaters in your area fine california though we're filthy with with vhf uhf ham radio there's so many um repeaters there's so many packet stations like that's still a thing down here we're going to go back to repeater book this time we're going to go to proximity query so i'm in cerritos i want 40 miles from my house and 70 centimeters let's see if we get a different result ah yes how many do we have now 65 actually 52 when you do the auto button well that's more usable so i can just probably throw that on the top of let's go here let's throw that on 79 and if you're following along at home i'm clicking the little adjust new location buttons and they go in steps of 100 channels 10 channels and then one channels and then they have the same and negative 1 negative 10 and negative 100. so i click ok and it will load from 79 all the way down until it runs out of memory which is 127 in this case so we could load the radio but um maybe we want to make some changes or maybe we want to load from the stock config so import from stock config there will be a bunch of different frequencies that you can download for things like noaa weather alerts there are frs gmrs i'm not saying to do that because that's technically illegal there are mers frequencies marine vhf railroad channels that's all there that you can technically import from and import it directly onto the space where it would go to your radio but let's say you're happy with this programming here you go radio we're going to upload to radio and everything should remain now balfang uv5r because that's where the programming came from we downloaded from radio first i'm verifying that my radio is still on it is and i'm going to hit ok oh my gosh i got 10 minutes to do the fun stuff i'm gonna have to jump ahead here turn on all the things right now and make this happen okay so now let's take it back to the uh great let's take it back to the overhead here so we can show you what we came up with i'm running out of time okay clearing a space here i will show you another setting while we're here hey i'm in memory channel mode and all i see is frequencies that's no fun i just went through that whole process of putting names on very well said menu zero let's go up from there i don't remember exactly the number it's on but i'll find it here shortly there we go let's make the b channel instead of frequency let's go to name yeah how about that hey canine kao who put that there wow that was happenstance if that worked out that way that's hilarious oh my gosh k9ko shout out to uh henry what's up henry that's funny that's really funny the last channel on the balfang that's where k9ko lives okay let's do um let's do ssdb really quick uh can you scan for repeater tone james um some baofengs do this one i don't believe does all right so i've got a sstv app here all right we've got an sstv app here and i want to see if i can transmit this picture of a balfang that's it right there so i'm going to go back to frequency mode and i believe it's what is it 146 one four four two hundred right one four four two zero zero so that's the transmitting frequency for sstv but this isn't going to play just perfectly with my um device here so i'm to use another cable i'm going to use this audio cable this is a aprs v01 cable it plugs in like the programming cable right there alrighty and i am going to plug that into my tablet at the top there okay they're plugged in now get out of the way you're gonna make me miss okay the last step we got to turn this thing into vox because it doesn't key exactly i may have a bad cable um some of these cables will key the radio off of the the pins here but off of the pins of the actual wire but this one does not so we got to go back down to vox and i'm going to lower vox to 1 or 2 for the sake of this it's confirmed and i want to have the squelch kind of low um that'll become handy later not needed now all right so in parallel i'm going to key this radio to okay let's slide this guy back now and here is a bowfang that's gonna sit there on the same frequency where's my iphone this may be a little loud but we'll have fun with it don't worry i'm using an app called sstv it is cq sstv from black cat systems got to make sure the modes match so this is martin m1 and this is transmitting on martin m1 put that right in front of the speaker and let's go nothing is happening oh that's why i did it wrong stop it's one for four one four four two zero zero okay hang on your butts that one's wrong oh because it's stop i've got the offset on remember when i set that offset let's go back to offset what one was that again there it is turn that off okay one four four two zero zero why does it keep switching i saved it oh there we go all right roundabout got it gotta like doing it live here we go oh looks a little wonky let's change it whew [Music] so timeout timer should you turn that off too [Music] and the system is down the system is down okay cool so there we go that was uh sstv what am i at five minutes five minutes folks five minutes okay the next one all right we completed sstv that is how you sstv by the way you don't need the receive side but i needed the receive side for the demonstration so now these are done so let's get them out of there all right okay one notch okay the next one we want to do is aprs so let's let's close this get them out of there get them out of there let's go to our applications for aprs although i showed you how to do this with a tablet i didn't show you on um a baofeng i showed you with the mobilink device so let's go back into aprs droid and let's go to one four four three nine zero and for the heck of it i'm gonna put the good antenna on how much time i got 56 minutes 56 minutes folks let's see if we can copy some aprs and maybe even transmit a beacon that's the wrong one oh no where's my oh my goodness are we getting a bunch of uh messages right now i think we might be or something yeah from ai7 eq so we got it [Laughter] we made it i don't know if this is going to get back to you but we're certainly going to try and we're transmitting let's see you gotta send me back a message if you got this dwight t said uh send a super chat have a great safe weekend y'all and merry merry christmas in case nobody has has sold you that yet uh no it's uh it's october bro let me go back a step here did i miss the super chat i think i might have uh yeah from jiffer not all pcs no i got that okay so i think i'm all caught up then very good let me go back here another one love the show so people are sending me messages we are getting them i've got a couple of stations listed so now okay we've got a bus and uh looks like a weather station over by apple valley so we are receiving um aprs i will say this is definitely not the best implementation i would much rather you get a better radio let me come back to me for a second here uh go back and watch that tablet video i did i was using an old kenwood th f6 that you can find fairly inexpensively and that is a much better radio than a bow balfing in a lot of cases you're gonna pay more you're gonna pay more for it but it's gonna be a lot better so i passed my 60 minute mark um but hopefully that was all helpful i hope it really was why don't we do this if anybody sean got it i did get the aprs message yes okay uh how about we do this everybody at ham radio crash course in the chat if you have a question that i didn't answer and i'll try to do it live otherwise we'll do that for about five minutes and then we're gonna end and we're gonna go to the discord after chat please follow us over to the discord after chat you can talk to me directly actually talk to a bunch of people directly and we'll be happy to answer your questions discord is where it's at for lots of people available at any time to answer your questions not just me and you know i can edit out the little parts i screwed up in the middle there but yeah i think we i think we got it oh um okay joseph gauss wants to see my okay hold on i can show you that that's not it that's it he was asking to see the uh show me your vhf uhf squelch numbers in the chirp menu where is squelch right there carrier squelch level is five so i'm assuming you want to go beyond that i don't know that there is an extra squelch menu setting no oh there you go those are all over the road there so there you go take a screenshot of that if you can't 0 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 0 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 there you go all right next question have you seen the abri ht radios yet yes i have i have seen them maybe i'll check them out i haven't decided to be honest with you i got to tell you um i'll i'll be i'll give you the real real and this just i already mentioned this on on my baofeng you know watch this before you buy a baofeng type video um or my thoughts on baofengs the uv5r is still 25 and really pretty close to just as good as some of its more expensive brothers and sisters that are in this space just because a brie makes a radio that functions almost identical to a baofeng doesn't mean that it's better it's just possibly like a re-branded baofeng so mr good wreck how do you set up a transmit pl and receive pl in chirp i'll be happy to show you that's not it that's it okay let me get this chat out of the way all right so back in chirp we still have all those repeaters that we set up well this is this makes it pretty easy so this first repeater wa2 sorry wa6 pps you set the mode to tone and you set the tone to 162.2 if that's the the case on the other side the tone squelch tone squelch is going to be for the receive side or if you have a dcts or dtcs code you want to use you would set that in the um rx side i'm assuming you meant tone squelch though so that would be right adjacent to it if you click on that derp you can match it with the hearts that you want to use so if it was 162 if it was the same as the transmit you would set that right next to it so tone squelch ethan freeman says see you in the after chat ko4 kva 73 thank you very much ethan appreciate it all right uh sean ki7eq asked can you set separate transmit and receive pl tones in the bell thing yeah so i can set this to 82.5 for tone squelch if i wanted to and you can do the same thing on simplex um so here's here's here's a bit of a crossover um randy not a rubicon right i'm sure a ton of you are are watching randy's videos good stuff uh we are gonna meet up at some point i i do owe him a message we need to talk on the phone uh to sort some things out on how would we hang out but he always mentions that privacy tones are not private same thing as pl tones uh they do nothing on the receive side they do nothing all it does is tell your radio to start listening that's all it's doing if you don't need it for a very specific reason and you'd better have a very specific reason why you're turning it on don't turn it on sean wylan says huge fan of not a rubicon yeah he's a funny guy he's really funny he has a really good production style too uh you know as mentioned like find a niche find your voice in video he has a niche and a voice it's a it's a pretty wide niche though gmrs is getting real popular good for him you have to enstore the repeater um so keep in mind let me go back to my my my wonderfully done slides i don't care what any of you say where are my slides where are my slides that's not the right one there we go um keep in mind the pl tone is when you are transmitting into the repeater the cc the ctcs tone that sub-audible tone that is sent from your radio the repeater hears that sub-audible tone and says oh somebody's transmitting into me and turns on and when it's when it turns on what it's doing is it's receiving your information your fm modulated signal and it's then transmitting at the same time outbound through the uh cavities out through its uh its antenna and transmitting on a slightly different frequency that pl tone is needed because if it didn't have it anybody that was just transmitting open on any frequency that would that repeater was close to would kick it off the pl tone adds a little bit more intention to people turning on the repeater to use it that's why it exists um the only reason why i have rx tone on is some local repeaters don't tx the id with the tone oh interesting zack that could be a good point we down here like i never i never run it but i could see that as a valuable thing if the repeater um courtesy tone or the the required id tone that they have to send out for the call sign you know the the morse code characters they send if that doesn't kick off your pl tone then doesn't activate the radio that would be a good thing to have on some of your frequencies that you monitor for um first responders or something like that that's pretty cool actually i like that you know what loyal you made me come around uh 180 degrees on that one i turned 360 degrees and moonwalked in the direction of turning a receive pl tone on i like that if it's doing it if the repeater's set up that way shane hey what's up shane great great to work on 20 meters last week yeah you were we could have we were just talking poor you were like down the road for me almost oh that's right the repeater wouldn't pass the tone it's just going through the path yeah okay fair enough i like it so that the repeater far away might pick up the signal during grid propagation times yeah that's true too okay guys i think that's enough questions if you want to follow us to the discord after chat uh that would be great for everybody that's watching this after the fact if you're watching this to try and help you out get started with the baofeng and it helped you out let me know in the comments i know everybody here thank you so much for watching live i really do appreciate it but sometimes people don't like to watch the live stream because they get going a little too long like i said i will definitely put chapter markers in so you can you know hone in on exactly what you're looking for but yeah okay and if you want to know anything about the aprs stuff or the sstv stuff this has all been covered in other videos so i will link those and put the cards appropriately and all that stuff so you can follow along very good okay that i think i'm good with that said let me let me say a big thank you to our patrons thank you so much patrons you guys help support obviously this channel but also my podcast that i do with my wife uh that keeps that a rolling the uh some of the costs that go into that um keeping it going because that's actually there's there's podcasts are a whole world of crazy it's not like youtube where you know they'll throw an ad on there occasionally and even though we're ham radio we still get a little bit of money to help offset some casa stuff podcasts are a whole different world you're it's it's a wild west in some ways of the internet podcasts are still like that but anyway i appreciate you all thank you very much i really do appreciate the support i am keeping an eye on the chat though thank you very much i will uh say that the chuck shaw is not a great wine but two tips open this bottle at least an hour before you're gonna drink it and um decant always decant hey vern six thank you wow man vern thank you so much for the super chat buddy i appreciate it if you don't know what decanting is go buy yourself a go oddly enough go buy yourself a funny looking vase that has a thin neck that has a wide base just dump the wine in that there you go that's a decanter tell your wife it's a expensive decanter not a vase you picked up somewhere oh seriously you can make any wine that that is like a five dollar wine ten dollar wine tastes like a 20 wine if you just decant it that's all you have to do serve it immediately at that point but yeah hey there's bunny shout out to bunny shout out to all of the producer patrons but by the way what are we gosh we're almost i gotta come up with the i've got my costume for the halloween episode guys just keep that in mind i've got the halloween costume ready greg t on thank you brew crew let me raise my glass of bruku and i'll answer the question why wine well you see i was doing a baofeng video today uh greg i was doing a baofeng video today and the reason why i went with uh charles shaw is this is affectionately known as two buck chuck this is a wine that you buy by the case at uh trader joe's for like 24 for a case at least that's when it started it's more expensive now but this is like literally a cheap cheap wine not bad though oddly enough served in glass bottles which is kind of amazing not a bag um anyway it's called two buck chuck and i thought that was apropos for a ham for a baofeng ham radio video well appreciate y'all i i definitely uh have not dipped into the baofeng well in quite a long time other than to make just a couple of in from informative videos i haven't done one of these more detailed knowledge based videos so i hope this was helpful um so if you enjoyed it please give me a thumbs up consider subscribing and remember live stream is on saturday 5 p.m pacific standard time and we're rolling into a ham nation week so we'll be kicking that off next week at 6 p.m pacific standard time i'll be doing a talk on monday for a ham club so i'll likely be editing that and reposting it it'll be on um a couple of my radio kits that i put together over the years we'll be talking about my my emp trash can you know i love that my satchel packet radio satchel and then my poda pack or my um my backpack that i carry for lightweight comms anyway thanks so much for watching guys i'm heading over to the discord i'll see you over there hope you join me take it easy 73 cue the song [Music] play that music [Music] oh my god canadian prepper podcast i got i owe you an email buddy or all you all of you i love you great people by the way go listen to the canadian forever podcast it's great stuff i listen to you guys while i'm at work it's great [Music] i didn't forget guys i i saw it well i did forget i forget but then i remembered and then i forgot again i'm writing notes [Music] and if you made it this far shout out to next week usn er doc will be back and we'll be talking about first aid safety preparedness and ham radio once again [Music] david's a cool guy and i'm always honored to bring him on the show so hope you check it out for next week all right i'll catch you over on the discord 73. [Music]

Channel: Ham Radio Crash Course

Views: 441,396

Keywords: ham radio, hoshnasi, introduction to ham radio, ham radio basics, amateur radio, amateur radio antenna, ham radio antenna, operating HF, hf radio antenna, ham radio review, emergency radio, ham radio crash course, raspberry pi ham radio, ham radio digital mode, raspberry pi emcomm, ham radio emcomm, vhf uhf packet radio, ham radio packet radio, aprs, YACC

Id: 6uJOXJt8BT4

Length: 74min 14sec (4454 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021