Handheld radio recommendations required

[Anonymous]

Hi, needing help here please.

I have my UK radio licence, I bought a Baofeng UVR5 many years ago and did play around with it but only in a workplace scenario, I did not actually ever get to contact anyone at all other than a couple of work collegues on site.

I want to purchase a Budget Range handheld.

I would prefer one that has both digital and analogue capability.

As versatile on the different wavelengths achievable (budget considerations accepted).

CB capable would be nice but not essential.

I am just looking for the best budget options so that I can now become more actively involved in amateur HAM Radio.

My maximum budget is roughly £150.00 (ish) for radio and antenna(s)

Grateful for any suggestions, ta.

[M0PWXParticipant]

Hi, anon

first thing is where is your rough location? this will help to identify any repeaters close to you that will help you make contacts

second, do you know which digital mode is more prevalent in your area?

you have
DMR which is a fairly open standard
System Fusion / C4FM which is proprietary to Yaesu
Dstar which is pretty much icom radios only

the other option is one of the internet backed digital voice platforms like echolink you can run from a PC or mobile phone (but you still need to be a licensed ham with a callsign) or if you get a cheap DMR/DStar/C4FM handheld you can pair it with a “hotspot” which are basically a raspberry pi with a small very low power transceiver board on them (look up pi-star in google)

i have a pi-star here, i can connect to it over C4FM from my FT991a and it can be configured to link into DStar and DMR as well as C4FM

it all depends what you want to do on the air

73
Peter
M0PWX (not pete M0PSX that runs this site)

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 5 days ago by M0PWX.

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