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Railfan Technology > Radio review report


Date: 01/29/25 13:19
Radio review report
Author: WW

I have not updated my radio testing reviews for a couple of months or more—mostly because I haven’t had much positive to report.  In this interim I have tested several of the low- to mid-priced “Chinese” radios.  The performance of all of them, with one exception, has been markedly substandard.  More about that exception in a minute.  As it stands, the Quansheng UV-K5(8) (and its numerous essentially identical brand-name and model variants) is still the low-priced winner in the railfan portable radio market.  Especially when the aftermarket (but free) Egzumer 0.22 or related “NuNu” firmware is loaded into the radio, the UV-K5(8) has flat-out the best overall performance in the low-price market and will, in fact, outperform many amateur and commercial portable radios costing hundreds of dollars more.  Its performance is so good that my Uniden BC-125AT and BCD-160DN scanners have sat in my radio drawer with the batteries removed for months now.
 
So, about the “exception” radio that I tested.  It is the BTech BF-F8HP Pro radio.  BTech is a South Dakota company that imports Bao Feng radios from China that have been built and/or modified to BTech’s specs.  Unlike most of the Chinese radio companies, BTech actually has very decent U.S.-based customer support that is both responsive and knowledgeable.  When I e-mailed them a technical question, they responded to me within a few hours.  BTech also provides periodic firmware updates to the BF-F8HP Pro.  Overall, the BF-F8HP Pro is a fairly decent radio, priced at about $60.  Unfortunately, its weak spot is its poor weak signal reception.  It is not awful, but the Quansheng UV-K5(8) will run circles around it, and costs about one-third as much.  As such, I can’t put the BF-F8HP Pro on my recommended list.  That’s too bad, because the BF-F8HP Pro has 999 memory channels, a decent keyboard and display, good audio, and is relatively logical to operate.  BTech says that there is a firmware update coming at some point to address a couple of small issues with the radio.  I hope that the firmware update might address its lack of weak signal reception, but that may be a hardware issue that can’t be fixed.
 
I will briefly mention one other radio that I’ve reviewed before—the Tidradio TD-H3.  This radio is also not on my recommended list because of several shortcomings in its “out-of-the-box” form.  That said, there is a free aftermarket firmware update from “nicsure” that actually cures many of the TD-H3’s deficiencies and turns it into a darned good railfanning radio.  Unfortunately, the firmware is hard to find and often hard to install, even for experienced radio users.  It also has a “deal-killer” bug in the nicsure firmware that will allow the user to inadvertently and unknowingly alter the frequency of a memory channel while one is adding or deleting a memory channel from the scan list.  If and when those firmware deficiencies are cured, this radio might approach the desirability of the Quansheng UV-K5(8).  Until then, I don’t recommend the TD-H3, notwithstanding some of the accolades that it gets from the amateur radio community.
 
As always, I will try to answer questions.  At this time, I have no current plans for further radio reviews, unless some new and interesting products come down the pipeline. 
 



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