How To Use Baofeng UV-5R Menus & All Menu Settings Explained - For UV5R & Other Ham & GMRS Radios

today i will be attempting something that no other youtuber has ever successfully achieved and that is explaining all of the menu options of a baofeng uv5r type radio without boring anyone to death as i already mentioned today i will be going over all 40 menu items and options in a baufang uv5r not just a uv5r many radios have the same menu options some have a few more some are missing a few options but i will be explaining how to get into the menus what all the different all 40 of the different menu options do why you would or would not want to use them this applies to a baofeng uv5r all flavors of the baofeng uv5r alfang bff 8 hp redivus radio oddity btec even some of the wookson ocean radios have similar menus and the operation of the menus items is very similar my demonstrator unit will be my first my very first six years old my old classic baofeng uv5r has been off-road with me hundreds literally hundreds of times pretty much every weekend for the last six years this radio cost me 23. and it still works just as well as it did the day that i bought it now some people some people will leave a knee-jerk reaction comment saying something to the effect of that radio is nothing but cheap chinese junk no doubt you've seen these comments on other videos youtube videos my youtube videos all over youtube on many web forums online forums this seems to be the default knee-jerk reaction of some people and when someone some people say this or leave this comment what they really mean to say is what they're trying to say is i paid 10 times more for my radio and i feel stupid but because of my social retardation i don't know how to properly express my feelings of inadequacy so when you see these comments by people online online forums on youtube just try to understand and remember that these people are idiots and you should point that out and make fun of them so let's get started oh i'm sure nobody wants to hear about this old digital dinosaur let me just get that out of the way and yes i do have the proper licensing to use that radio so all you said hams out there can take this opportunity to pull your panties out of your ass and move away from the keyboard okay where was i before i started making fun of the idiots that leave stupid comments because they think they own the airwaves okay so a quick refresher of how the menu items work to get into the menu options first you want to make sure that the radio is not locked and if you look at my radio right now you will see a tiny itty-bitty little key or lock icon there which means that the keypad is locked if i try to do anything [Music] it doesn't do anything so to unlock the radio i just press and hold the unlock key you will see a tiny little blue lock there press and hold that for a few seconds the radio is now unlocked and the little locky key icon is gone i am now free to press any buttons that i want and screw this radio up as much as i can so the way the menus work is you press the menu button this then brings you into the menus you'll see a little number flashing here that's the menu item number every menu option has a number [Music] if you wait too long it will timeout and it will just return back to the main screen which mine just did mine also just automatically locked again unlock menu right back where i was and you can scroll up and down through the menu items using the up and down arrow keys you may notice also that every key here on most radios has a little in this case blue set of letters and that means that if you when you're in the menu options if you press that button it will take you to the corresponding menu item now you may not know what those mean that's why you're here because i'm going to explain them all to you but for example number two has the little txp that stands for transmit power so if i was in the menus and i press the number two quick key that would take me quickly to that menu item number five wn quickly takes me to if i do it right the wn wide narrow band number four vox takes me to vox and so on so you can either scroll through the menu items you can press a quick menu button or you can press the number that corresponds to the menu item that you want to go to so if you know that menu item 12 is what you want to go to you just press 12 or 13 whatever number you want to go to and it takes you to that number once you are in the menu item that you want to change so i press 2 to bring me quickly to the transmit menu you'll see there's a little icon here that means this is the menu item that you're on but you haven't you can't change it yet you're still in the scroll up and down mode so if i wanted to change the transmit power txp i would select that menu item and then hit menu again now the cursor moves down to here indicating that i can now change that menu function to change it you just use the up and down arrow keys to go through whatever options are available so for this menu option transmit power on this particular radio i have a low and high option only so i select the option that i want i hit menu again and that saves it i can then hit exit and or just wait a few seconds and now i'm back to my home screen so now that you know how to confidently get into the menus one quick warning do not change something if you don't know what you're changing you probably don't know what you're changing that's why you're here watching this video that's a good thing but if you're not sure what a menu item is don't change it okay let's let the fun begin i'm going to hit menu menu item 0. the list starts at zero menu item 0 is the squelch setting squelch is to set a level so that you don't hear static all the time if you had no squelch at all all you would hear is static and if the squelch is too high you may not hear people that are talking from far away so i generally set mine at around five although on the balfang radios the squelch is not very sensitive it tends to be either on or off so as a final example of how to use the menus i'm going to show you what it sounds like with no squelch so i'm going to hit menu again to select it and use the down arrow key to turn it off zero squelch menu again and now all i get is static so i can hit menu again i'm on squelch hit menu again to select it turn it up menu again to confirm it and now it's squelching out that noise that is menu option zero menu option one step this determines the how much the channel or the frequency goes up or down when you're in vfo mode and you hit the up and down arrow button so when i or when you're scanning so every time the frequency changes either by you hitting a button or when you're scanning the step menu option determines how much it changes so right now it's set at 25k if i change it to 10k hit menu again to save it go back now when i hit the up and down arrow you'll see that the frequency increase is only 10 kilohertz menu option number two transmit high and low power some radios have a high medium and low power that just determines the output level the power level the wattages of the radio number three save on some radios it might say bat save or battery save this is a battery saver option and what that does is it determines how often the radio is actually listening for for transmissions so when you set that menu option it's just a uh level of one two three or four the higher it goes the more it's going to try to save battery which means it doesn't scan and listen as often or as quickly for transmissions what that means is and the reason that i always turn it off is when you have it on if somebody starts talking it may not actually hear and listen and then you wouldn't hear that person talking for a second or so after they began talking so if you notice that when people talk always the first second or two of what they're saying is cut off assuming that they're pressing the button on their radio and transmitting correctly it may be that you have that battery save option enabled and the radio is not hearing the first word that they're saying so i always keep that off vox vox this allows the radio to automatically start transmitting when it hears a voice and the level that you set the number that you choose is how sensitive it hears and listens so that would be handy if you have maybe a uh external headset plugged in and you don't want to have to push the button it replaces pushing a button to talk when it hears your voice it will start transmitting that usually does not work out very well because then you're transmitting when you burp and do say other things it hears other noises it's going to start transmitting doesn't work very well on the inexpensive radios wn wide band channel bandwidth issue so she's telling me what these are [Music] channel bandwidth wide band or narrow band now the difference between wideband and narrowband i should make a video about that basically allows you to set wideband or narrowband so what you set it at depends on what everybody else is using abr number six abr automatic backlight that determines how quickly that backlight turns off and on you saw it just turned off i think that's in seconds you can turn it off and the backlight would never turn on [Music] i like to keep mine at five or ten seconds the quicker you turn off that backlight or if you never turn it on at all the less often the backlight is on the longer your battery will last tdr is the dual receive feature as you know these radios have two frequency lines that means you can listen to two frequencies at the same time so right now i'm on these two different frequencies it is actually receiving in both on both frequencies at the same time so if somebody were to speak on either of these frequencies i would hear them unless i turn that off now even though it still shows the two frequencies because you can't ever turn off the two displays because you can still switch between them using a and b to talk but for receiving now that tdr is off it is only receiving on the one that i have selected by using a and b it is now receiving because tdr is off on the lower frequency it is now receiving on the upper frequency as you can see by the little arrow and if i turn tdr back on it is now listening on both frequencies and you can see the little s i think that is there i can hardly see it that's supposed to tell us that it's listening on both beep that is the keyboard beep so that every time you press a button it beeps if you turn that option off [Music] it's now silent operation so i'm going to leave mine off because it does get annoying tot talk out timer that is how long you can talk by pressing the button before it will stop transmitting you can change that in increments of 10 or 15 seconds at a time [Music] so when it is set at 60 seconds that means i can press and hold and talk and jibber jabber on the uh with the press to talk button and transmit for 60 seconds at 60 seconds it will simply stop transmitting the reason for that is if you accidentally press and butt dial the ptt button you don't want it transmitting all day long so it will automatically turn it off helps keep the radio from overheating and keeps the long tuckers at bay rdcs is receive digital coded squelch dcs is a tone the same as the cts tones i'm going to go through all of these together rdcs rctcs it's a tone what some people call a privacy tone that is not private those tones are also needed for accessing repeaters r for both of these dcs tone and ctcs tone means receive t dcs and t ctcss means transmit so if you have a t c t css or dcs tone set it it will include that tone in your transmission when you're transmitting r means it is listening for that tone and to set one you just select the option scroll through and pick the tone that you need to use and the way that you know what tone to use is the person that is telling you a tone is required tells you what tone to use or if you're using it to connect to a repeater the repeater owner tells you what tone to use voice this changes our baofeng ladies voice to different languages or you can turn it off i'm going to turn mine off to avoid distraction because she sounds so sexy a id is a code it's a number basically that you can only set in the software like if you're using chirp and that's used to send an id that just shows on the screen of another radio that's able to receive it or that's able to display it [Music] if you hit the alarm button most people would never have a need for using a id dtmfst digital dtmf are tones the phone tones that you hear when pressing like dialing a phone and the different settings determine when that id is heard and which it uses so there's different settings you can set these at i don't know why mine were on before i keep them off s code is signal code and again using the software only you can put a code a number in and that ties to a id that is sent when you select another menu option menu option number 19 which we will be at in a minute not not very useful most people would not use that sc that is the scanning method this tells the radio what to do when it's scanning scanning through frequencies or channels and it hears something so the scanner scans through everything either frequencies or channels that you set and this determines what it does when it hears something t o means that when when it hears something it will stop and listen for a set amount of time co means that once the person stops talking it will start scanning again that's usually the most useful setting and s e means that when it hears something the scanner will turn off it will stay on that channel ptt id that is the push to talk id which can send numbers tones like telephone dialing tones and that's what you set in menu item number 17 so you can set it to send those codes either eot is end of transmission so when you're let go of the push-to-talk button b-o-t beginning of transmission so when you first start talking both start and end or as is most desirable off none pttl time lag time so that is how long in milliseconds the radio waits from when before it sends the ptt id that you would have set in the previous menu so if you had it set to uh beginning of transmission it would wait three milliseconds before sending it you will probably never have a need for any of that mdf mdf-a and mdf-b this determines what is shown on the screen here now i think now i'm in vfo mode when you're in vfo mode it's always going to show a frequency but if you switch to channel mode by pressing the vfo slash mr memory channel button now i'm in channel or memory mode [Music] these two menu options mdf-a and mdf-b determine what will show up there so right now a and b are both set to show the name i could change them to show the free the channel number that it's assigned or the frequency so if i change mdfa to frequency it's now showing the frequency on a b is still showing the channel normally i would keep them both on name but one thing that a lot of people do and sometimes i'll do this i will set the top line to show my name that i have set and you can only set these names using the software otherwise it would just say channel one channel two channel three and i'll set the lower name to show the frequency and then when i put both a and b on the same channel i know the name and the frequency thusly you know what channel it's on because you can see the tiny little channel numbers over there so let me show you how that works mdfa so i'm going to have the top show the name i'm going to have b show the frequency so now i can see the name for channel whatever that is four and the frequency for channel whatever that is nine doesn't do me a lot of good but if i use the a b button go down to the lower one and put them on the same channel [Music] now you can see that they're both on channel four they are synchronized so now as long as they're on the same channel i know that that one that channel name is on this frequency very handy bcl busy channel lockout if you were to enable that that means that when you transmit if that channel is already in use or somebody is already transmitting on that channel if there is a carrier present the radio will not allow you to transmit because it is busy so the channel is locked out as soon as someone stops talking then it will allow you to talk i like to keep mine set to on so that i can step on people and talk over them when they need it auto lock this makes the radio lock automatically after eight seconds i don't think you can change that eight seconds so when that is on the radio will simply lock itself automatically requiring you to then hit after eight seconds and then you would need to hit the unlock key to press any buttons i usually have that set on so that when i'm out using the radio if i hand the radio to somebody to listen i don't want them accidentally pressing buttons and it i don't have to manually lock it it will lock itself but for purposes of this demonstration it's irritating me so i've got it set to off shift d s f t d and offset these are both for setting up repeaters s h s f t shift d is for setting up a repeater in vfo mode or frequency mode offset you use when in channel mode both of these are would take an entire video to go over them and explain them so i'm not going to do that here but that's what they are for 27 mem channel that's for setting and saving channels you enter the information in vfo mode and then you save it here this also would take an entire video to go over everything and how to do it but if you were to do it you would do it here dell channel delete channel that's an easy one that's how you delete channel information so you go to the channel that you want to delete if there's already a channel programmed it will start with a ch if there's no channel programmed it will just be a number so one channel 125 there's nothing programmed in there because it it there's no ch there but channel 1 there is so you would delete it by selecting it and then hitting menu to confirm i do not want to do that wt led that sets the back screen there for when it's in weight mode or standby mode you change that by selecting the color and there you get a pretty purple orange blue rx it's the same thing it changes the color when you're rxing or receiving so when it's receiving a signal you set the color there [Music] tx same thing when you transmit this selects the color that the screen will show i usually set it to off because when i'm transmitting i can't see the screen so that just saves a little tiny bit of power by turning it off because i don't care what color it is when i transmit almod alarm mode this is actually an important one as you know the boof wang has a alarm or call button and when you press it it makes a stupid sound and that menu option al mode number 32 determines what that alarm does sight means you only hear it here on the radio tone means it transmits a tone over the air i'm not sure what that tone is code means it transmits a number code like a dial tone code i don't know what that code is i don't care because i put it on site so that if i accidentally hit that button it doesn't actually transmit to anywhere because i don't want to transmit you've probably you may have heard other radios transmitting those stupid alarms over the air you can prevent that from happening by setting the al alarm mode to site next option is band number 33 and if you're in frequency mode i don't understand what it does the description says that it shows the low band limit frequency on the screen when you transmission when you transition from uhf to vhf i i don't understand what or why it's there as far as i can tell the way that i use the radio it doesn't make a difference not saying that it doesn't do anything but for me and my usage it makes no difference tdr a and b when you have the tdr enabled which was way back on option seven i think so when you've got the dual band receiving so when you're receiving on both frequencies at the same time if you have that enabled this determines which line a or b top bottom a b determines which line the radial returns to after it receives a signal so off means it will stay on the frequency i think will stay on the frequency that it received something on so when tdr is enabled right now top line a is selected with a little arrow there if it were to receive something on b it would switch down to that that means that when i press the push to talk button it will transmit on that frequency so when you push to talk when you transmit it transmits on the frequency or the channel that has the little arrow so right now if i were to push the push-to-talk button it would transmit on this channel this option says okay when it receives on either channel what does it do does it does it switch to that channel and keep listening meaning that when you push the talk button you would be transmitting on basically whoever last talked or does it switch back to a or switch back to b so leaving it off means that when it somebody talks somebody transmits if you have the tdr enabled it will just stay on whichever one last transmitted on or it will switch back to the top of the bottom whichever you select and that determines when you transmit which one it's transmitting on clear as mud ste is a squelch tail eliminator it's supposed to get rid of that sound that you hear when you let go of the button the other radio has to support it also and this is for when you're in simplex mode talking radio to radio rp ste is repeater squelch tail eliminator that has to be supported on the repeater and it does the same thing it just makes it so you don't hear the the chunk sound at the end of the transmission but the repeater has to support it also rpt rl is the amount of time i think in millisecond yes in milliseconds that it waits or listens i don't know exactly my apologies i have failed you that's how long it waits after you let go when you're transmitting before it sends the tone that enables the squelch tail elimination eliminators power on message what do you see when you turn the radio on online i probably went by pretty quick i put in a custom message that i put in using the software you can change that to a custom message full [Music] which didn't seem to do much those are the only two choices so custom message that you can only enter using the software like chirp or full which is i guess just the default message from the booth wang man roger the most important setting of all the roger beep it's a on or off setting and that enables the roger beep at the end of your transmission when you let go it makes a little baby sound so that the people listening to you know that you're actually done talking very important feature to have because so many people love to hear it if anybody ever tells you to turn your roger beep off or that they are annoyed by the roger beep tell them it is their problem not your problem if they don't like it they don't have to listen to you and finally option number 40 reset all when you screw everything up this is your last resort to clear out everything on the radio and start over there's two different options all means everything back to the factory defaults just like when you took it out of the box for the first time vfo only sets some of the frequencies and let's see and the menu options it resets doesn't erase channels i think that's the main difference where all wipes it clean so be careful when using either of those and you would only want to use those when you really screw things up did you die of boredom if you did please ask a family member to leave a comment and let us know if you have questions if i left something out if i went too fast if it didn't make sense if i said something wrong leave a comment below comments comments answering questions that nobody asked off topic comments don't go asking a question about repeaters and cars on this video about menu options or comments with opinions that nobody cares about those comments will all be deleted or better yet pinned to the top for everyone to laugh at and make fun of so bear that in mind [Music]

Channel: NotaRubicon Productions

Views: 11,149

Rating: 4.9337578 out of 5

Keywords: how to use a Baofeng UV-5R, baofeng ham radio, uv-5r menus, how does the baofeng menu system work, how to use uv5r

Id: 7jFn7ZGVldg

Length: 29min 26sec (1766 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021