RIP The Baofeng. REPLACED with the Talkpod A36 PLUS!

ah the former King of the VHF and UHF Chief handheld the bowfing uv-5r I'm sorry mate but you're starting to look a bit old and a little bit out of date because we've got stuff like these this is the talk pod A36 plus let's have a look at it today now normally I do a hey let's do an unboxing video but we're not going to do that today because hey unboxing videos are boring so let's do a re-boxing video thank you we've got a talk pod this is a talk POG A36 plus I'll put some links in the description below to where you can check out more about this radio this is another one of those well I think one of the direct competitors to the good old staple the baofeng radio there's been quite a few of these that have been coming out lately you'll know remember that I did a video on the Quan Chang radio this is uh relatively similar it claims that it does uh what do we hear uh 144 to 148 and 430 to 4 40 megahertz I have heard that this radio will also do air band as well so we're going to check out that today to see if it actually does at least this version we'll do some output power tests see if see what kind of output power we get out of it and uh just sort of have a bit of a look at you know the the main Alternatives that you can get to one of these because the quality is actually improving on some of these we used to call these cheap Chinese radios but they're actually you know pretty good we need to do this too that's always a first thing that we need to do the uh the talk pod A36 let's plug in a battery and turn it on Channel mode oh Channel mode seven six five three one let's get into vfo mode how do we do that without looking at the manual that's one thing that we don't want to do we don't want to look at the manual you don't need to look at the manual to do these sort of things surely a lot of these radios are coming out with this USBC it is so good it comes with a USB C to USB a cable so we can plug that directly in and charge the battery it is so good to be able to see that that's one thing over a uv5r that you don't have you can't charge this battery with USB let alone USBC there's a dock in charger this looks like something that is a little bit cumbersome can we actually line it up there we go so it tells you when you're plugged in the other good thing is it comes with this little charger this little USB charger as well you've got a lanyard so you can put that on and also a programming cable which looks fairly similar to the valve Fang ones looks like I think they're all the same they're probably all got the same sort of chipset in here for programming and let's have a look through the manual it looks pretty good it is very small writing so they probably should increase the pages and uh make it a little bit bigger but it's in very easy to understand English so that's good so we've done that we've assembled the belt clip we've got LED indicator that tells us on the top if we're transmitting or receiving excellent charging powering on and off we've done all that so let's keep going and see if we can find where the vfo button is another important function of a radio is the ability to ability to actually do stuff without having to go in and change you know a whole bunch of settings to do something very simple this looks very similar of course with most new radios you takes a little bit of time to learn the screen is very nice notice that if we if you press a b it changes this main between the two vfos let's go into I think this is this is the menu button here we go Roger beep look at all our settings memory channels this is pretty cool instructions details if you click on this it gives you a QR code that you can scan for the instructions so that's that's pretty sweet if you don't have them on hand I don't know what that button does a lot of beeping oh SOS button okay we won't hold on that because that's probably going to transmit something that we probably don't want to transmit so the first button is FM radio so let's while we let's have a look here and see what we can tune in okay so I'll turn that down because we're playing music but that seems pretty pretty good Clarity on that so that's great let's try and find a channel that we can listen to without getting demonetized you can never find TalkBack radio when you want it so that's turned up that was from there so that's Turned Up full volume 1976. it's actually pretty good for the bad it's actually a very good quality actually okay so it looks like we've got I think these are NOAA Weather Channels so the bottom button is programmed for the the NOAA frequencies if you want to listen to those we don't have those here but you can do that there's also a very important warning here about the antenna it says do not whatever you do swing the radio by the antenna because it will wreck performance all right so you don't want to shorten the lifespan of the antenna so whatever you do don't do that okay so I finally figured out how you get out of Channel mode and into vfo mode so you hold the green button and we're in frequency mode now so apparently this thing can do an air band now did we say let's have a look one one oh there we go seven two four three departures frequency one two five days four five five oh wow okay that [Applause] [Music] that was pretty readable I don't know if you how well the microphone picked that up but uh I could understand the tower and also the aircraft there so that's uh that's good so we receive airband Roger beep okay let's uh let's test out the Roger beat because everyone wants to know what the Roger beep sounds like oh okay so that's that's yeah that's okay oh oh it's also got the Motorola squawk so there we go so there's your two Roger beeps it's got Vox timeout timer wide narrow all the standard things that you would expect from you know the equivalent one of these or not the equivalent but this is this is what we base everything off isn't it these days one of these bow things that's the that's the standard it's dual watch but it's not uh full duplex so but that's to be expected for a cheaper radio like this programming options I think that you can download the software on the website I'll see if it's available in chirp I'm not sure if it is available in chapter program with so let's do an on-air test and see what it sounds like this apparently has a one watt speaker in it and like I've already listened to airband briefly but it actually sounds pretty good so let's just see what it sounds like now to do this test I'm going to use my IC 9700 in the background I'm not going to use another handheld radio or anything like that we're going to transmit and receive using the IC 9700 and let's just see how it sounds I'll go out of the room so that you can hear what the audio sounds like on the talk pod 36 plus the A36 Hotel is an A36 Plus that's him it sounds like someone's actually heard hello how are you Mike vk7 FB vk7hh you uh you may be featured in a video so uh how does this radio sound to you [Music] the audio is excellent sounds very good vk7hh vk7 foxtrot rubber okay yeah well I'm just sitting inside at the moment uh down in the in the studio so I was just doing some on-air tests to see what it sounds like so thank you for doing my job for me but it sounds like it actually sounds pretty good it's a little uh little portable handheld and it's a nice green color and I'm sure that when the video comes out you'll be able to see how you sound fair enough I just realized most of the noise was actually coming from the scanner you're you're very good signal that's turned all the way up bit of volume all the way up it's interesting but uh it's a good signal so there we go that's the uh that's the 36 on a real live on air test because obviously someone heard me testing it it's pretty loud like the speaker on this is really really good I had that turned all the way up for that contact just then and it was really uh very clear easy to understand that might change with am so let's just see how it sounds with um listening to the control tower Antoine aircraft when we get something through so just from listening it it gets distorted if the signal strength is a little bit low which you know you kind of expect when the signal when it's really good and I mean I'm only running off the little stock antenna by the way when the signal is good it's actually really easy to understand at least the tower is easy to understand them [Music] third one so that kind of gives you a little bit of an indication 8 000 departure frequency one two five day small five five foreign [Music] [Music] [Laughter] I've got this hooked up to my test monitor and I've got a length of rg223 some low loss coax that I use for testing hooked up to the radio using my adapter kit and we're on 146 decimal five zero zero one four six five zero zero one four six five hundred high power and we get four point nine Watts that is exactly what I would expect let's crank this down to low power now whatever that is and we have 2.8 Watts on low power on 439 4 Watts 4 Watts at high power and low power we have one and a half Watts quick receiver test now and that is minus that's not too bad I don't know what Scorch setting that's on that's minus 123. so what are some other features of the radio we'll have a quick look here through the website you can see that it comes in a variety of different colors I got the green because the green like sort of stands out and it's actually quite nice you can also get black and which you know standard sort of radio or you can also get a crystal which is this silvery color as well if I can actually get it to it there we go silvery color so that's uh that's you know the three colors that you can get actually DTMF we didn't test that it's got DTMF keypad let's see if that actually works does this guy sound Australian by the way hero maybe not anyway let's try DTMF bk7hh test oh okay ttmf does work my goodness that was loud okay so DTMF works that's good to know text locked at gmrs for USA market so you can use this on gmrs as well the screen is fantastic we talked about that ip54 jet uh water jets rated so ip54 means that it's sealed against dust and other things and also 54 I think 54 Splash proof so you can run this basically let's go on let's let's go and put it under the the let's go and splash some water on it I'll I'll put some b-roll of the of the splashing and uh to make sure that it actually does continue to work the bowfing uv5r doesn't have that but this radio does so that's another feature you might drop it in the river and you can pick it back out and it should still hopefully work all right Burger [Laughter] and welcome to fire your National age still works even though it does say that it's ip54 I wouldn't uh recommend chucking it underwater because I just did that and now the speaker's not as loud I think it's got some water in it yep so there's still water coming out of it so hopefully that dries but anyway for testing purposes that's what happens so I think it's I think it's still working [Music] I'm improving the Audio I think it's back to what it was supposed to be before word of warning don't put your radio under the water unless you're doing a review and it's for testing purposes like I did so what are my thoughts on this radio well um compared to these other radios which I suppose are the direct competitors if you're going to choose out of these three you've got you've got some choices to make I guess the Quan Chang radio I saw some that were going on AliExpress for like I think they're 15 or something so that's super super cheap there was some issues with am reception and some you know other little quirks with this it has uh this has USBC charging this has USBC charging so that's the same this can receive slightly wider frequencies whether it's effective on that or not is another question um so if you take that out because obviously that's probably the cheapest of the lot these two are roughly probably around about the same price I think this is about fifty dollars on Amazon and there's a link in the description below to this radio uh the bowfing radio you know they sort of vary in price but you know anywhere between 25 dollars and forty dollars if you're going to choose between these two like the talk pods a little bit bigger um I do like the look of it and the fact that this the best thing about it is the screen like look how easy that is to read it's also got the Dual the Dual watch as well like compared to that like let's just compare the two like just even in the camera just seeing that I don't think I'm going to have any issues um you know reading this screen it's actually really really nice the audio before um before I went and put water in it sounded fantastic um but you know uh it's on air transmit audio is a little bit down in level which is a problem with a lot of those Chinese radios it may or may not be a problem depending on I haven't listened to my audio because I couldn't hear myself but it just sounded to me like it was a little bit low but um great little radio it looks very very rugged I like the you know the belt clip and everything else they're just improving all the time with their designs I think this is a fantastic radio again if you want to get one of these then there is a link in the description below maybe the talk Pod radio is not for you and you're more interested in one of these two radios if you are then there is a link to a playlist where I've done other reviews and information on these radios that you can go and view please check them out on my channel if you enjoyed this video please subscribe because subscribing means that you will get notifications when I release new reviews and new videos

Channel: Ham Radio DX

Views: 228,798

Keywords: ham radio, amateur radio, ham radio dx, vk7hh, ham radio australia, hrdx, amatuer radio, talkpod, talkpod a36, talkpod a36 plus, talkpod a36plus, talkpod a36 plus review, ht talkpod a36 plus, talkpod handheld, ht talkpod a36, talkpod a36 review, talkpod a36plus review, talkpod a36 radio review, cheap handheld radio, cheap handheld ham radio, cheap ham radio, best cheap ham radio, best budget handheld ham radio, gmrs radio, cheap gmrs radio, gmrs radio for beginners

Id: utRG-rYptNE

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 17 2023