Continued to go nutty

[lonestarbandit]

Well. I may have gone slightly black friday mad..... but after all my wife IS asian rofl.

 

[lonestarbandit]

Ahhh. Gotcha..
Don't feel too bad. I just got chance to try the Retevis RT-85 radio.. And as expected, modulation is very poor..
On my modded old Baofeng UV-5R, its transmit audio is loud and clean. The Retevis you had to basically yell into the thing to hear it even with the baofeng's volume up.

I will wait to see if someone does a modulation mod for the RT-85. Otherwise, for $23 for the 2 pak, I can keep them around.

I havent recieved the new " AI" powered Retevis handheld yet ... it's still in shipping. Guess we will see how it's audio is once it arrives. Still have to get base antenna up, waiting on coax, and the 2nd RA-25 mobile for the truck as 1st one was/is intended as the base radio. So far all the handhelds I have seem fine.

Those Tidradio h3s, the baofeng AR 5RM and Baofeng UV9RM PRO all seem to work satisfactorily.

 

[lonestarbandit]

Man I for once have the best timing.
A local ham decided to install a GMRS repeater on a 200 ft tower in town bout 12 mi from me and allow open access.
he just listed it on myGMRS I happened to both hear them talking on it and finally found the specs and got on there been a blast I haven't got my base or mobile up yet but my little handhelds with better antennas can hit the repeater from inside my house. Lots of fun!

 

[lonestarbandit]

As it turns out the UV9R PRO or whatever turns out to have crap audio even with an external mic so it is being sent back to Amazon. The AR5-RM on the other hand got excellent reports beating out the Tidradio H3 pair on audio though the H3s were said to have great audio also.

 

[lonestarbandit]

Found this on YouTube still waiting on mine to arrive.

 

[BC Coyote]

On my modded old Baofeng UV-5R, its transmit audio is loud and clean. The Retevis you had to basically yell into the thing to hear it even with the baofeng's volume up.

That is very likely because the FM deviation of the Retevis is narrower than the Baofeng. If you listen to 2 KHz deviation on a radio that's setup to receive, for example, 6 KHz deviation, audio on the receive radio will be less than 50%. Conversely if you transmit on a radio with bigger deviation than the receiver you will get mega distortion.
There are, unfortunately, a number of different standards for what is called narrow FM or NFM, leading to exactly the type of situation that doffo experienced.