Railfan Technology > Baofeng UV-82 questions

I am thinking about getting a Baofeng UV-82 radio for railfanning use. Have a few questions.
Is this a good choice for railfanning? Anybody have one? Where is the best place to buy one?
Any info will be appreciated.


Thanks.
Doug

I have no experience with the Bao-Feng UV-82. But I do have a Bao-Feng UV5RE+. It is not my preferred railfan scanner.

KG

I know it's not directly applicable to the UV-82, but I picked up a UV-B5 a few weeks back and will share my thoughts on it. It's the upgraded version of the UV-5R, with better internals which are more capable of ignoring intermodulation and have slightly higher receive sensitivity. From what I understand, the UV-82 and the UV-5R have the same internals, with slight external case modifications. I think the UV-82 comes with a slightly better stock antenna than the UV-5R. The older radios(UV-5R and UV-82) have some add-ons available, such as extended capacity batteries, and cases, which haven't been produced for the UV-B5 yet.

I got the UV-B5 as a replacement for my Yeasu VX-5R, and so far with the stock antenna its performance has been adequate, but not quite as good as the VX-5R with an aftermarket antenna. Battery life so far seems to be 2-3 days of listening from 10am to 10pm. It has 100 memories, which can fit the 97 AAR frequencies and a few extras if you need. The user interface is a bit clunky, but with a bit of practice it makes sense. With any Baofeng radio, I'd recommend getting a programming cable and using a free program called Chirp to enter the frequencies. I've been happy with it so far, and with the low price($32) if it needs to be replaced I won't feel too bad about it. I got mine from amazon.

Top_bullfrog
Sacramento, CA

I own a Baofeng UV-B6 (the UV-B5 is nearly identical--the B5 doesn't have a flashlight, the B6 does) and the UV-82 is essentially the next generation of the UV-B6, except that it has 128 channels instead of 99 and has 2.5 kHz tuning steps instead of the 5 kHz on the UV-B6. The UV-B6 and the UV-82 are very similar as far as features and performance are concerned, and they share essentially the same advantages and shortcomings. From what I've read, the UV-82 actually performs a little bit better than the UV-B6 in selectivity and sensitivity. Based on my experience with the UV-B6, either radio will be an excellent performer, especially for the price. My B6 has performance nearly as good as my commercial Kenwood TK-290 that cost about 15 times as much when it was new. The bad news: the scan function on the UV-B6 and UV-82 is nearly useless. Adding or deleting a channel from the scan list can only be done through the computer software, not on the radio keypad. Most everything else can be programmed (albeit not very elegantly) from the keypad, but that can't. The scan is also slow. So, if you want to scan multiple channels, the Baofengs are not the radio to have. Otherwise, I suspect that the UV-82 will be like the UV-B6--a physically tough, good performing radio at a "throw-away" price, as long as one doesn't really use the scan function.

Baofeng tends to release a new model about every 3-6 months. I'm hoping that they listen to their customers and come out with a 250-channel version of the UV-82 with keypad scan add/delete and fast scan speed. That would allow a railfan to program all 187 AAR channels in the radio. That radio would go right to the top of my list for a narrow-band analog radio to use until the railroads go fully NXDN digital. I suspect that a 250 channel radio will be coming from Baofeng fairly soon--if they want to go head to head with the Japanese radio manufacturers (and some of the other Chinese manufacturers) in the commercial VHF radio market, that's the benchmark Baofeng needs to meet.

As to where to buy a UV-82, Amazon is a great place because one can take advantage of their return policy, if necessary. At a lot of the Chinese purchase sites, if the radio is bad or arrives damaged, your up the creek.

I will add one comment about most of the Chinese radios compared to the amateur radios made by the Japanese. Because the Chinese radios are designed to do commercial radio work (though many do not actually have an FCC Part 90 certification), many of them will do the narrow-band 2.5 kHz frequency steps. Most amateur radios won't accept anything less than 5 kHz steps. So, before buying an amateur radio, try to input one of the "splinter" AAR channels that will be coming into use. Example: AAR Channel 107 is 160.2225 MHz, 192 is 161.4975 mHz. If the amateur radio won't "take" those frequencies when entered either from the keypad or the computer software, then you won't be able to listen to the splinter channels when they are being used.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 03/12/14 14:58 by WW.

Thanks for the info everyone. I do appreciate it.