Comment on What Can We Do to Get Youth into Ham Radio?

<- View Parent
beastlykings@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

The problem is that cheap equipment literally performs worse, for you. And can make the frequencies around you worse, because of poor filtering or bad circuit design.

I’m not saying $4000 needs to be spent. You can get all the radio you’ll ever need, for $800-900, with an icom 7300. Now that’s not cheap, but it’s definitely in the realm of feasibility. People pay more for cell phones in some cases.

But, if you want a more manual experience, and save some money, you can get older Kenwood hybrids for $500-600. Heck I bought my ts530s for $300 when I first started, it had an issue where it was partially broken, but I was able to fix it just by cleaning a few switches with deoxit.

But baofengs, while they can work, and heck I own them. Some of them are pretty poorly built. I definitely experienced issues with mine, adding more antenna started making my signal reception worse! I later learned it was front end overload, from cheap filtering. But that’s besides the point.

I’m sorry your experience was so bad, and that people were rude to you. And it’s a shame you never got to put that donated equipment to use. It really is a fun hobby if you can get into it.

source
Sort:hotnewtop