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Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

The attitude towards Baofeng handsets annoys me somewhat. I've had both of mine on an SA and they were absolutely fine.

What tends to happen I reckon is that the end user runs it into a cheap antenna or mismatch and nukes the LPF, something which can happen to a $500 Yaesu HT if you're an idiot.

But the gatekeeping is strong in amateur radio. Annoyingly so.

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And I get it. You've spent decades and $1000s acquiring HAM equipment, learning the craft, just so you can DX some guy in Kazahkstan. Then some amateur with a $80 handheld and a bit of antenna wire manages to pull off the same thing. Without the years of experience and hundreds of dollars of equipment.

It's worse than that really. A lot of people are like a acquaintance of mine. Bought a FT DX 5000MP, which wasn't cheap, has hundreds of books on the matter, boxes of cables and bits of antenna, speaks knowledgably on the subject but hasn't made a single contact yet after 5 years of having a license. But he hates 'feng scum like me.

Not with a Baofeng. Long distance DX is typically done with HF gear at lower frequencies. Baofeng is a 2-meter VHF radio where communications is basically line-of-sight.

You can do satellites and ISS with a feng though. Don’t have to go across or round, up is good too :)

You're right in the context of Baofeng HTs, but people get equally furious about some Chinese HF radios as well, like the Xiegu X5105 or Recent RS-918 (though the argument with that one is that it ripped off the open design of the mcHF, but the fact that it's an all mode, all band QRP HF transceiver with better features than the likes of a Yaesu FT-818 costing hundreds of dollars more probably factors in as well).

Very true, HF radios are nothing magical. Very common parts can make you as good HF radio as physically possible.

$10k iComs are mostly unicorn poo, with exception of somewhat useful DSP filtering, for which the real cutting edge research in radio tech is said to be used.

So true. One of the first things I did was build a direct conversion receiver with decent audio filtering. It had 45 mostly discrete components and sounded as good as a top end Yaesu. Similar to this one: https://aa7ee.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/using-the-nm0s-hi-per...

The elitist attitude is what kept me from becoming a radio amateur.

(Back then, ham radio software was also consistently proprietary payware - in an area where every participant would have benefited so much more from an open source approach, as you could expect actual contributions - and software-defined radio was the devil, at least that was the impression I got.)

It put me off too for many years. If it’s any consolation there’s a lot more welcoming people these days. Tends to be the older hams and a section of black box operators who suffer from elitism. The younger lot (under 50) are totally different.

As for open source, this was probably the original open source. Lots of people build their own radios and still do and publish the designs for nothing. There are technical journals such as Sprat which cover this on old fashioned paper form. Software is mostly open now from what I have seen. Main tool these days for digital modes is a good example http://www.physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/wsjtx.html - some people are using this with home build SSB transceivers and computer interfaces.

They're just (more often than not) lousy radios, buy a used Motorola, or a Yaesu FT-60.

They're not that bad really. The programming interface sucks but what HT doesn't it suck on?

I've got an FT-60 and FT-818 as well for ref.

They're disposable radios - you cant fix them, align them, or otherwise do much to them, every single one I've seen has poor selectivity and sensitivity. They do usually transmit on frequency and are decently stable, but thats about it.

You’re correct but that doesn’t stop them being useful.

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