Gary, I'm not sure what's going on with your particular setup, but CHIRP allows countless thousands of happy users to successfully program their radios from a wide variety of manufacturers.
Jim's response to your earlier email described how Baofengs operate inside the radio, and how CHIRP takes the users inputs from its spreadsheet interface and properly populates the radio. If you take your GT-5R and read its current contents into CHIRP, are the channels explained directly or not? If you save that data off to your HD, then create a brand new setup, importing from repeaterbook or manually entering several repeater frequencies into CHIRP then writing them to the radio, do they display/work as you expect in the radio? Assuming your radio is properly programmed, the average Baofeng has decent range (handful of miles) to a repeater when the HT is on the OEM antenna. If you upgrade to a better antenna (say a SignalStik or a Diamond/Nagoya antenna) you should have better luck hitting repeaters a bit further out compared to the OEM antenna. In my experience, Baofengs are good for nearby repeaters and allstar nodes, but quite challenging to use simplex (no repeater) in an urban area (I learned this at a recent parade where the team decided to try 2m simplex, and I couldn't hear most of the stations along the parade from my parade route location). Other, major brand, HTs will undoubtedly perform better, but most HTs come with antennas designed to fit in the box, not to maximize the performance of the radio in the box. Good luck, Ken, N2VIP > On Jun 19, 2024, at 09:36, Gary via Users <[email protected]> > wrote: > > After much deliberation, I have to ask an honest question: what is the > purpose of Chirp? To be fair, all I have been using it for is my 2 > Baofengs. I have a Wouxun KG-Q10H, but use its own programming software so > far because Chirp hasn’t picked it up yet. But if hooking up my ‘Fengs to > Chirp does nothing more than populate a channel list with freqs, or change > the messages, maybe you can explain what Chirp really does, what it’s > useful for. What are memories for if they can’t be programmed with Chirp? > Why are the other settings there? > > It seems to me that, at least with Baofengs, Chirp is only useful for > loading the radio with a list of downloaded repeaters…after that, each > channel has to be manually “tuned” in VFO mode in order to process the tone > and split, at least. The memory list is just there for look-up. Am I > missing something here? > > And the radios themselves seem to forget, or change even the manual > settings. I have no idea on how to make individual frequency settings stay > after programming them. In Memory mode, in VFO mode, nothing stays as it > was set. > > I guess it’s time to throw these junkers in the trash and actually spend > some $$ on a real radio. > > 73, > -= N4YVN =- _______________________________________________ Users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.chirpmyradio.com/postorius/lists/users.lists.chirpmyradio.com To unsubscribe, send an email to [email protected] To report this email as off-topic, please email [email protected] List archives: https://lists.chirpmyradio.com/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/
