Almost every ham has some sort of VHF/UHF portable, many if not most having at least one of the ubiquitous Baofeng or Pofeng portables…. all made in China. There are detractors galore, many claiming that the Baofeng products are poorly made, have poor quality control, and and have excessive spurious emissions. There is a general sentiment amongst the ham community that you should spend more… a lot more and get a so called ‘quality’ radio from one of thre “Big 3”.
Well not so fast…
This was indeed true in the early days when the first UV 5r portables came out in around 2019… Some of the radios were so bad, their spurious emissions were almost the same as the fundamental, clearly an indication of poor or no low pass filtering on the output. That’s changed, and with the addition of low pass filtering most tests on YouTube now show the UV5r has at least -37 db of attenuation of the second harmonic…
That’s pretty good for a radio that costs a mere $25.
I recently purchased a few of these radios; I now have 3… even here in Mexico they are readily available and are almost given away considering the low price point; about what it might cost for a couple a greasy burgers n fries at McD’s…
Physically, they seem fairly robustand have decent sensitivity; with the UV5r usually putting out about 4 watts on 2m… not the 5 as advertised…but that’s not really a big deal.
Ditch that rubber duck and spend a few more bucks on an after-market quality whip antenna.
For the best handheld 2m portable antenna, popular choices focus on monoband ‘performance’ or high quality dual band whip antennas… there are numerous but the Nagoya NA-771 (genuine… there are plenty of fakes) seems to be a favourite. But the very best is the TWAYRDIO Dual Band VHF UHF Ham Radio Telescopic Antenna. This is a true, properly matched full 1/2 wave antenna on 2m and it’s performance far exceeds everything else…. I have one on order from Amazon.