The UV-5R Explained For Beginners - Full Overview Of The Baofeng UV5R & What The UV-5R Buttons Do

a very wise man once said there is no such thing as a stupid question that man lied today i will be giving you an overview of the boofwang 5r radio much of everything that i say in this action-packed video also applies to the baofeng bf f8hp other radios as well basically any radio that looks like this with this kind of buttons you'll recognize it it's a very familiar face if your radio looks like this then everything that i say will apply now i have done a lot of videos over the last year or so talking about the buff wang uv5r and in every one of those videos some people some people always complain and leave comments saying why do you always make these videos about the uv5r it's junk nobody uses these radios well i make these videos because in fact a lot of people do use the boofwang uv5r and similar radios and a lot of people need help learning how to use them so all i can say to all of those experts that keep leaving that type of comment is if you don't like watching videos about the uv5r and don't watch videos about the uv5r idiots allow me to now commence with the overview of the balfang boofwang uv 5r the boofywang uv5r is a ham radio although they do make gmrs versions but those have a different name those aren't a uv5r they're uv 9x or uv9g the older uv5rs can transmit on pretty much any frequency in the range anywhere in the range from about 130 megahertz to about 500 megahertz depending on when you bought it now one very common question is can you use the uv5r to transmit or listen to cb radios that would be the united states cb radios and the answer is no you cannot cb radio in the united states is in the 27 megahertz range and the booth wang uv5r only goes down to around 130 or so megahertz depending again on when you bought it the newer uv-5rs are locked that means that it is limited in what frequencies you can transmit on on the older ones you could transmit on any frequency in the range whatever range the one you have covers but the newer ones are locked so that you can only transmit any specific ham bands balfang did that to comply with the fcc rules for selling these radios in these united states but baofeng also made it very easy to unlock the radio so that you can transmit pretty much on any frequency that the radio is capable of transmitting on i have a video in the information section below showing you how to unlock the uv5r in the event that you have a newer one that's been locked all right enough fondling this baby let's show you what everything is on the back of the radio you will find a battery the uv-5rs usually come with a charger charging cradle that you set it in to remove the battery press here and pull battery slides in and out like that the stock battery that it comes with is very small this one is 1800 milliamps i've seen 1700 milliamp batteries now depending on what you're going to be using the radio for meaning if you're going to be transmitting a lot this small battery may not meet your transmitting needs so you can buy larger batteries this 3 800 milliamp hour battery is much bigger holds many more electrical juices than the small battery it's only like 20-25 bucks i will put in affiliate link below it attaches the same way and makes the radio look much bigger that's a good upgrade for your radio especially if you use your radio to transmit a lot when you transmit when you're talking it uses the battery a lot more than if you're just listening we're going to keep everything stuck for this video the antenna on the boofwing uv5r is removable you simply grasp the radio in one hand the antenna in the other hand and twist counter clockwise it has a standard sma female connector on the antenna so if you buy a replacement antenna make sure it has a standard sma female hole the radio has a standard sma mail connector the antenna goes into you can connect a larger antenna an outside antenna or you can get a better antenna and simply replace the antenna because the baufen uv5r is a uhf and vhf radio it goes from 130 megahertz up to in some cases it may not go down to exactly 130 megahertz yours may not depending on when you bought it so for all you experts out there getting ready to break your fingers leaving a comment saying that yours only goes down to 129 megahertz or whatever all of them are different depending on when you bought it but because the range is from very low around 130 megahertz all the way up to relatively high 480 to 500 megahertz one antenna will not suit that whole range very well so you can buy replacement antennas nagoya makes a very good antenna for both uhf or vhf or gmrs depending on what range you plan to use your radio in a very good upgrade to the stock antenna not necessarily because it's a better antenna than the stock antenna but because you can buy one tuned specifically for the frequencies that you plan to use i'll put affiliate links below i'm going to leave the antenna off so that i don't [Music] poke myself in the eye normally you do want to have the antenna connected when you're transmitting contrary to popular belief and lies spread upon the internet transmitting without the antenna will not blow up the radio will not kill the radio will not damage the radio watch no antenna i'm pushing the button it didn't catch on fire it did not sustain any damage i have another video where i transmit for several minutes i've done a few videos transmitting several minutes with no antenna connected and no damage has occurred so on your uv5r on the top you will find an on and off and volume control a led flashlight the aforementioned antenna hole you've got some buttons on the side i'm going to go over every one of these buttons you have a display more buttons i'll go over all of these speaker the microphone is also hidden in there the microphone is much smaller this is not the microphone this larger area is the speaker the microphone is just in one tiny little corner the other side you have your programming port and port for connecting accessories and on the back you have the battery that we've already discussed and some screw holes for putting a belt clip on let's start with the cable port this is where you put in a cable for programming it from a computer this is also where you would plug in an external microphone or speaker you can program almost everything by hand by pressing the buttons but there's a few things that you can can't do on the keypad that you can only do on the computer that you would need a programming cable programming cable plugs in thusly and if you're using one of these make sure that when you plug it in that you really plugged it in because some of them are really tight and when you think you've plugged it in give it another squeeze make sure it's in there all the way many people have problems with their cables or their software or they think it's a radio problem getting the computer to talk to the radio and that is almost always a driver issue because some of these cheap chinese cables don't work very well with windows or some people say windows doesn't work very well with them i use the slightly more expensive wookson ocean cable affiliate link below it's only 15 or 16 dollars and mine has worked all the time every time so that cable always works this is the type of cable the important part here is that the cable has to be a k1 or k type connector and that's what you use to plug in to your booth boothwing uv5r radio there if you do not have a computer you can also use a wireless programmer such as the tid radio bl bluetooth programmer affiliate link below i've done a few videos on these these are great this you also plug into the accessory port thusly you turn it on and then you use your phone your android or ios iphone device and you use the software on the phone to program the radio wirelessly no wires required this is a great little miracle of modern technology and it only cost around twenty five dollars again affiliate link below if you do use the software on your computer using a cable i believe in my opinion that chirp is the best software to use it's free it runs on windows linux mac it's very easy to use although you do have to learn how to use it chirp c-h-i-r-p free download i'll put a link below alright so let's go through the buttons and the operation of this bad boy so i'm going to turn it on we'll start on the side you've got this orange button which when you press it once puts it on fm and then you use the up and down arrow keys to change the frequency or you can put the frequency in directly press the orange button one more time and it goes back to regular radio mode press and hold the orange button and it goes into alarm mode press it again to make it stop so what that does is makes useless alarm noises it also transmits that tone over the air that alarm tone you can turn that off in the settings of the radio most useless feature ever you have the push to talk button that is the button that you push when you want to talk so if i push it you'll see the little red transmit led just lit up that means that it's transmitting and yes as already mentioned there is no antenna and the radio did not catch on fire or destroy itself the monitor button short press turns on the flashlight short press again to turn the flashlight off or make it flash sorry [Music] one more time turns it off press and hold the button to put it in monitor mode [Applause] what that does is disable all the squelch and everything so that you receive and hear everything the radio has a squelch setting so that low signals you won't hear low signals if you think those signals are being cut out by the squelch you can check by putting it on monitor and then you hear everything that the radio can hear we've already discussed the programming and accessory port we've already discussed the battery moving along to the front buttons vfomr variable frequency oscillation something i don't know i don't care that means direct frequency input and mr means memory or channel input so pressing that button switches you between channel mode as the baofeng lady just said and frequency mode when you're in channel mode you will know that you're in channel mode because you'll see the channel numbers showing up here i'll talk about the display and the different lines of display in a minute that's how you know that you're in channel mode so that you can switch between the pre-programmed channels that you have so i just went to channel 127. i only have two channels programmed in if i had more channels programmed in i could switch through them or scroll through them using the up and down button or i can press the buttons here to go directly to that channel so you will see that the top line is currently on channel 0 i could go directly to channel 127 which is the only channel i currently have programmed by typing in one we will come back to what the two lines mean in a moment when you're in channel mode you can't directly go to frequencies if i wanted to go to any frequency i can't won't let me all i can do is go to channels by typing the channel number in or going up and down if i want to directly enter a frequency in i have to go to frequency mode and now i can now enter directly a whatever frequency i want to enter as long as the radio is capable of receiving or transmitting on that frequency many people leave comments on other videos asking why i can't put in 2700 megahertz it's because the radio can't transmit or receive in that range if you try to put in a frequency that it can't deal with say for example 20 it won't even let me put in 27 megahertz read your manual so that you know what the frequency range is before you try putting a frequency in that it doesn't like otherwise it will just give you the screw u tone a b button as i alluded to earlier there are two lines line a and line b and the a b button switches you between a and b top and bottom and you'll see the little carrot there the little icon the little arrow whatever you want to call it bottom top a b the little indicator there whichever line you're on indicates which one you're going to be transmitting on should you press the push to talk button the radio can receive on both channels it can listen to both of these lines at the same time so if anybody were to talk on either of these right now i would hear them but if i were to press the button i'm only going to transmit on that one where that little arrow is now i will transmit there that's called tdr and you can disable tdr the multiple channel scanning or listening you can disable that so that it only listens to one frequency at a time but even if you disable the dual monitoring or the listening to both lines at the same time it still is going to show two frequencies you cannot turn off the dual lines both frequencies so if dual monitoring is off that's menu option seven if i turn if i turn dual standby tdr off now it's only listening to the frequency that i'm on but i can quickly switch between those two to listen and talk to either one so with that dual standby tdr disabled i'm only listening and talking on the one that's selected a or b currently on a if it's on i'm listening to both but only transmitting on the one that's selected i don't think i turned it off properly all right now it's off so now i'm only listening or transmitting on the top line now i'm only listening or transmitting on the bottom line because i have disabled the dual standby or tdr in menu option 7. next we have the band button the most useless of buttons on this entire radio this button only works if you're in vfo mode frequency mode and that just switches between the high and the low bands but you could just you could just type the frequency in the band button i don't know they had to fill some space we've got the menu and exit button menu takes you into the menu system which you can then go scroll through up and down to find the menu option that you want optionally you will see that there are little blue letters on the keys those are shortcuts to menus so if i wanted to go to the wide wn wide narrow setting i could just hit that button while i'm in the menu and it takes me directly to that setting if i want to go to box vox now it's selected to make a change i hit menu again and then i use the up and down arrow key to change my setting if i screw up i hit the exit button that brings me back but if i wanted to actually change something for example tdr i'll hit number 7 tdr if i want to turn that on i hit menu use the up arrow button to select my option and hit menu again to save it i can then wait for several seconds and it will go back to the regular home screen or exit and i'm done as i mentioned those are shortcut keys for when you're in the menus all those blue letters except for this little lock icon that key icon that locks the keypad so that when you're adventuring and in an active situation you don't accidentally start pressing things and screw the radio up by pressing and holding this little lock button that will lock the keypad so now when you press a button all you get is the screw u-tone to unlock it simply press and hold again there is also a menu setting that you can go to to tell the radio to automatically lock after five or ten seconds after you turn the radio on so that it's always locked and then you would need to unlock it by pressing and holding the lock button as i mentioned previously you've got the up and down buttons which you can use to scroll through your channels if you were in channel mode to scroll up and down through menu options basically you use the up and down arrows to scroll through whatever is on the screen in most cases now that really is all there is to the boofwing uv5r now there's a lot more menu options and configuration i have a whole other video about what all those menus do and how to set it up for repeaters and all the complicated things there's links in the information section below to all of those videos but as you can see the basic layout using the radio is fairly simple you now know everything worth knowing about the buffaling uv-5r if you have any questions that are actually related to this video and the baofeng uv5r leave a question below and someone will come along and answer it wrong [Music] you

Channel: NotaRubicon Productions

Views: 254,901

Keywords: Baofeng UV-5R, baofeng uv5r, baofeng gmrs, baofeng ham radio, ham radios, how to use a ham radio, how to use a gmrs radio, what is a uv-5r, how to use a uv-5R, ham radio for beginners, uv-5R for beginners

Id: KJ_sSjPmQ08

Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2022