My Southwestern Colorado: Motorcycling, Ham Radio, and More!

The Chinese are here!

Chinese companies have entered the US ham radio market. They’ve come up with some very inexpensive handhelds, with prices so low that they’re hard to ignore. The Chinese radios will do everything that the Japanese radios will do, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll do everything the same way. The Japanese have been in the US ham radio market for decades. Three popular brands are Yaesu, Kenwood, and ICOM. Over the years, these manufacturers have become highly attuned to the US market. Their radios are easy to program and easy to use.

The Chinese radios are variants of public service radios made for an entirely different market. In this market, the person who has the radio really isn’t allowed to fiddle with it. Actually it’s the same in the United States—only in amateur radio is a radio operator also allowed to be the radio programmer. That may seem odd, but your firefighters and policemen use radios that are set up by specialists. Well, these radios cover VHF and UHF frequencies. So it wasn’t too hard for Chinese makers like Wouxun to add a keypad (almost universally missing on public service radios) and market them to US ham radio operators. Both the Wouxun and the more recent entrant, Baofeng, reflect this public-service heritage. In what they call “frequency mode,” or what the Japanese would call VFO, you can input frequency directly using the keypad. In fact, the Chinese radios, instead of “VFO” and “memory,” have “frequency mode” and “channel mode,” meaning exactly the same thing.

But the similarities disappear there. Both the Wouxun and the Baofeng are designed to be Continue reading →