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Reviews For: Baofeng/Pofung UV3R

Category: Transceivers: VHF/UHF+ Amateur Hand-held

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Review Summary For : Baofeng/Pofung UV3R
Reviews: 127MSRP: 55
Description:
Tiny dual band radio like the Yaesu VX3R.
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.verotelecom.com
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
001273.9
PA3HGT Rating: 2011-08-18
simple & great Time Owned: 3 to 6 months.
You can't give it a 4 for this cheap HT.
For this amount of money you can expect nothing of this HT,if it works , you're lucky.
Had 4 (black,red,blue and camouflage color) of them and all of them worked great.
Vox and volume is not 100% but so what ...
Like a amateur said : if the battery is empty,you can throw it in the ashtray.
I have now the camouflage-version and i enjoy this little very little radio more than a average UHF/VHF all-modeTRX.
KC2QBK Rating: 2011-08-18
Great Buy for $ Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
My UV3R arrived just a day ago.
Spending part of my lunch hour programming
in local repeaters manually. Also used the software
to input repeaters.

Total cost with a few accessories is $54.
NO complaints.
Great little rig for my briefcase.
It can hit a few repeaters around work and home.

NO comments about the construction, manual or anything else. $54 says it all.

Nice toy.

HAMMYGUY Rating: 2011-08-16
Better TX/RX than VX-2/3r's for $34!!! Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I've owned the VX-1R, the VX-2R, AND the VX-3R. They all have been sold due to very poor receive sensitivity on all models. Not to mention the super low power output.

So along comes a little Chinese hand held from Baofeng for the super low price of $34 plus shipping. I honestly thought it must be a total POS and wasn't going to order it due to having other full size radios. Well curiosity got the best of me and I purchased one on eBay. About ten days later a box shows up and inside is a little radio about the size of the VX-3 with full accessories. The battery was a tight fit, but after that it fired right up. I figured that the radio would be on par with a cheap Family Radio service rig. Boy was I wrong.

The first thing that I noticed immediately was the fantastic receive sensitivity with it's stock VHF antenna. Signals that were noticeably weak on other mini's were almost full quieting on the UV3R. Now that got my attention! Then came loading up a few repeaters which was pretty straight forward. I actually was able to get a decent signal into most of them that my other mini's couldn't even ker-chunk. Whoa!

But where is the air band, the 800Mhz receive, the AM broadcast band you ask. Who the heck needs that garbage? They don't work well on the other mini's I owned and I'm not even sure why Yaesu put such poor performing bands in them.

But the UV3R puts out a solid 2 watts on both bands with excellent receive.

A couple of minor complaints though. The volume level at it's minimum is still pretty high. There is a mod out there that involves completely disassembling the radio, swapping a resistor, and then reassembling it back. WAY to much work. A piece of duct tape covering about two thirds of the speaker brought it down to a good level. Use a black color and nobody will notice. The other complaint is the crazy FM band. While it is easy to turn on and plays FM radio very well, turning the band off is frustrating. It involves a not very intuitive sequence of buttons. Plus if the FM band is on, the radio will keep reverting to FM and then hopping back to VHF/UHF like dual watch feature on other more expensive rigs.

Aside from those two items I got what I wanted. A good dual band mini that actually has some decent performance without a bunch of garbage thrown in just to market more features.


W0NTS Rating: 2011-08-15
W0NTS, Worth the money Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I purchased my UV3R on eBay. I wanted something very small and light that would hit the local 2M repeater which it does nicely. I paid $46 for mine. It was shipped from Hong Kong and I received it in a shorter time than many of the items shipped within the USA. I am impressed with the quality. Compared to similar offerings from other "big Name" manufactures, the UV3R offers good performance at a great price. The only "cons" I have is the manual could be a bit better and it would be nice if the antenna were a VHF/UHF duckie rather than (2) separate antennas.
DO3MIB Rating: 2011-08-15
If you only want a HamRadio Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
If you only want to work on HAM QRG: You need an working antenna, the Baofeng Antennas are junk!
The RX is ok but not good, TX and mod. is ok.
Just use it as an WalkieTalkie and youre be glad.

If you have another Handy, maybe from YAESU you will be disappointed.

The quality is no as it could be, and you will miss a lot of feature:

You can not:

-Name the channels
-Listen to HF
-Listen to Airband (no AM)
-Listen to anything under 137MHz
-Scan (the scanning is very slow, ~1,5 channels per second)
-No Skip in scan Modus, no Groups.
- use your earphone or mic from YAESU, same plug but different pinout.


I thinks its fine for young kids or for PMR or FRS. If you are low on money, go and buy a used VX2. Its much, much more.

One thing is very clever: There is a LED flashlight wich can be used by one button, even when the device is off.

I would not by this thing again, not even for 1$


KB0NE Rating: 2011-08-12
Lotta bang for the buck! Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Pros: Everything a person could want in an very small, simplistic and easy to use triple band radio (except a key pad and selective scanning [lockout]. Those options cost another $50US. (See "Wouxun")

Triple band? Yes, don't forget the commercial FM band too. While the rig has an FM stereo receiver they decided to simply connect both channels together. Fidelity is about what you might expect for such a small speaker.

What is hyper cool about this radio is that all the receive circuits are SDR. That means that there is no tuned IF circuit. This radio uses the microprocessor built into the receiver chip to decode the I and Q information of the FM (commercial band too) signal.

The factory programming software that comes with this radio is so-so. It works but requires a lot of typing rather than importing a CSV type file.

Good battery life between charges. Charges up quickly.

Cons: I have 4 of these and have found that the buttons can be touchy. Two of the radios required disassembly to fix/ clean the contacts on the PC board. No big deal but it can be annoying and if I could I would deduct 1/2 a point for that.

Would have been nice if they had a stereo headphone jack for the commercial FM radio but I really hadn't planned on using it that way and don't know if anyone else would find that worthwhile.
-------------------------------------
Going to use 2 radios for a cross band repeater, one was sold to a friend (great gift or sell to idea for budding hams) and the blue one matches my Smurf blue Goldwing.... ;-)

John KB0NE
KF9ZA Rating: 2011-08-11
Great backup radio to throw in the glovebox Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I got a UV-3R in the newly availalbe blue color. It arrived at about the same time the new "Smurfs" movie came out. So at the next ham meeting I was showing everyone my new "Smurf Ham radio". I can echo most of the good comments in the reviews below.

The lowest you can turn the volume down is still too loud. I like to monitor the local repeater on a low volume, but this radio won't go low enough. There are mods on the Web to fix this. I found a ham who has a UV-3R and had put together a great resource of links for mods. His site is www.brickolore.com Click on the UV-3R link in the top menu.

The radio comes with two antennas, one for V and one for U. I sprung an extra $10 and bought a 7" (19 cm) dual band antenna from 409shop.com when I bought the radio. The dual band antenna works really well.

I didn't buy the programming cable/software and didn't find it too hard to manually program it. Have gotten good reports on audio and have no problem getting into the local repeaters. After playing around with it for a couple of weeks I now have it in the glove compartment of my wife's car. That way I have a good standby radio if we are out and about and I didn't bring my Yaesu VX-7R with me. I'm in Indiana and you never know when severe weather might pop up.

I will take exception with one comment in a review. Another reviewer said that this radio would be a good starter radio for a new ham. I disagree. Yes, it is inexpensive....but who knows how reliable it is? I would reccomend a bottom of the line single band Yaseu FT-270 for around $130 for a new ham. The Yaseu (plus Kenwood and Icom) have the correct repeater offset hard programmed. The UV-3R doesn't. New ham might make a mistake and put the wrong offset in. Plus the UV-3R might break down. Stick with the major brand for your main HT, get the UV-3R for back up.
KF7OCD Rating: 2011-08-07
Not bad... Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
It's not the quality for the big three and not even close to Wouxun however for under $50 it is a good little radio. I got the new one with the S meter and the 18 item menu and I used an extra dual band antenna I had laying around.

The good:
Small (VERY small)
Preforms well
Low cost
Normal SMA antenna connect
Dual band
FM radio
Volume is strong and I get good audio reports
Easy to program without the cable
Comes with a nice little ear piece

The bad:
Can't name memories
When I hook it up to a very high gain antenna it gets over loaded (I hear a bunch of other transmissions)
Does not come in with a dual band antenna
NO DTMF or key pad (programming takes a while)
No CTCSS/DCS scan

A great starter radio for anyone getting into this hobby or a backup radio. It would be great if they did some quality improvement.
KK4CLC Rating: 2011-08-03
For the money, Can't really go wrong. Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I understand that this radio is not going to be the one that you pull out to impress all of your ham type friends, but for the money, it definitely gets the job done. I have three of these radios that I keep in the glove boxes of all my vehicles. I am not a big fan of not having a dual band antenna, so I do not use this radio for 70cm, just for 2m. The radio is TINY in comparison to most HT radios. Signal reports from contacts have been good, and the audio is a little loud on the #1 setting. However, this is not and should not be your MAIN or only HT that you have. It is a nice addition for possible emergency situations, or just another nice radio to have to play around on.

I bought the first radio for $57.00(US) which included shipping, programming cable, and programming software. I bought the second two as a 2X pair for $89 including shipping (that's $44.50 each). I am not rich by any means, but if I left one of these somewhere, I would not have a heart attack, unlike an ICOM 92ad (my dream HT).

So it is not the Cadillac of HT's and it does not have DTMF. It does however get into the repeaters with CTCSS and has 100 memory locations. It is easy to program with or without the software (I would recommend the software for multiple radios) and it costs $44.50ish. I love the thing and use it quite a bit and have had no real complaints.

I do have a S-meter on my radio and it has the new updated menu.

HB9FBN Rating: 2011-07-24
Better quality than expected; great little radio for the money! Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I'm agree with some previous reviews: Great little radio for the money! My one was received direct from China and originally fitted with a 1500 mAh battery 5.55 Wh (usually 1200/ 4.44 Wh), it takes abt. 5 hours to be charged and lasts a lot of time. I've just added (not elegant but effective) a 56 Ohm resistor in serie to the loudspeaker to decrease the audio level (too loud in the lowest volume setting). All functions are working correctly; Sub-Tones + 1750 (EU) and shifts for repeaters, S-Meter, all 18 menu settings, memories, FM radio, The LED torch :-). It is a pity that it hasn't DTMF. I just hope it will last...