Quansheng UV-K5 HAM Radio Walkie Talkie Encrypt RX DTMF Repeater 50-600mAh

This radio is highly comparable to the frequently recommended in this class Baofeng UV-5R. Which is fairly bottom tier, but not bad for its intended purpose and a great bang for the buck at this range. I feel like this one is better however. Compared to the Baofeng I feel like the button layout is a bit better, the interface is a little easier (though you still want to do as much as you can in software on a PC instead,) and it has slightly more features (like FM radio station reception.) It also has a medium power setting (which I assume is 2W) in addition to high and low, so it should be more compliant with some channels than the Baofeng (which only has high and low.) This also seems to work fine with Chirp. Chirp gave me a warning, but I tried it anyway and I had zero problems with it. It lacks a couple of settings you'll find in the official software (like the power-on password) but seems to work fine. The official software gave me no problems and seemed simple and minimal though, so either should be good. I only have two real complaints: the biggest is that you can't use it with a PC except via a special "serial cable" even though it has an actual USB port on it. The USB port is only for charging (and even then it seems like an afterthought — for example, you're not supposed to transmit while charging via USB.) Some functions like setting a power-on password require using the PC software to manage, not to mention setting up all the frequencies you want in its memory the first time isn't really something you want to do on the device itself. (You can, but you have to go into the menu on each frequency for several settings. I did this at first, but I do not recommend it.) This is still fairly identical functionality to the Baofeng in that it also requires using a serial cable to connect to software though, so either way you probably want to go ahead and invest in a serial cable like the CH340. With most such cables you can use the same cable with both and several other similar radios. I feel like they should just go ahead and include such a cable (or better still, make the USB port work for data.) Battery life also seems a bit weak for the battery's claimed size. It's not bad — if you don't use it heavily you'll probably get more than a day out of monitoring quiet channels — but my bet is the battery has a lot less than the rated capacity. If you transmit at full power I don't think it would last nearly as long (but I'm limited to "medium" for now haven't tested thoroughly so can't give a good idea of run time.)