The Ham Radio two point zero Audio podcast rip. Thank you for downloading and listening to this podcast. So basically what I do is I take all the audio clips out of my videos and upload them to spreaker and then from there they're spread out to iTunes and SoundCloud and now Amazon Audible as well. But I want to welcome you and thank you for joining the audio section of this
series on Ham Radio. I hope you enjoy it, and I would appreciate you leaving us a comment or a review on whatever podcast service you're listening from. Thank you in seventy three, I hope you enjoy it. UV thirteen pro one of the newest baalfang radios. It's advertised as a high power dual band HT, so we're going to take a look at it today. Good
afternoon, Welcome to the channel. My name's Jason. I'm KC five HWB is my Ham Radio call sign, and this is Ham Radio two point zero where we do reviews, news and how twos of things that are new in amateur radio. I've done videos about the UV five R, the UV nine R, the UV ten R. This is a UV thirteen R. I picked this up on eBay and It's advertised as a high power walkie talkie VHF UHF portable ham radio two way radio, so it sells for about forty dollars
at the time of this recording. It comes with the following items. So this stuff right here is what it comes. Does not come with the CWQ just FYI. So it's got a earpiece here with an inline push to talk button on it, so that's kind of cool belt clip. Of course. It comes with the antenna which I put on. It didn't It didn't come with the antenna attached. It did come with the battery attached, but it had a piece of plastic between the battery and the radio so that it wouldn't
run down the battery. It does have USBC charging on the bottom of a battery right there. In fact, the charging cable, it doesn't have a cradle here, you'll see no cradle at all. The charging cable it comes with is this USBA to USBC cable and a walwart that has a USBA in the bottom of it, just like that right there, so you can plug that in and charge it solely from USBC. So no desktop charger for this radio. This might be the first balfang, I've ever seen that doesn't come
with a desktop charger. Now, let me ask you guys this, what do you think about desktop chargers? The fact that this is USBC charging is a very forward direction, forward thinking direction. A lot of the hts today that are on the market, brand new hts don't include USB charging at all. At least the icon ID fifty two has a micro USB charger, so that's kind of cool. It'll charge via micro USB. That's good. But USBC is somewhat of a new thing to the Japanese companies. And finally,
the Chinese companies are starting to actually include USBC chargers. So the fact that this one does not have a desk charger, I don't think I care. I think if I had to pick between a proprietary desk charger and a USBC common charger, I would choose the USBC charger. Now a lot of you may say in the comments, well why can't we have both? Great question, ask the manufacturers. Because I don't get to make those decisions. I
would rather have both. Yes, I'd rather be able to drop in a charger, drop a spare battery and a charger and charge and also have a USBC charger, Yes, but if I had to pick one or the other, USBC would be my preference. That's my opinion. You may not agree. That's okay. Whatever you want to think is just fine. But that's where we are right now. So let's go through the menu of this radio. I'm going to zoom down here just a touch, all right, So
that's a little bit bright right there around this area. But you can see the screen, the screens what we're focusing on right now. So if I turn the menu on, it's washed out because I've brightened it up. But you can see the backlight is the menu right there? Okay, So backlight you can change when it times out, but you can't change the brightness. The one above ten seconds says, right, what does that mean? I suspect that means it just stays on constantly. I don't know what bright means
because the whole thing is bright. There's not a way. When I saw bright, I thought, oh good, there's a way to dim it. But no, there is no way to dim it. And that's just kind of where it is right there. Menu starting at zero right there and ending at forty two. So a squelch menu two point five killer hurt steps. That's good. Transmit power is high. There's high and low, no midpower. Okay, we're going to test that on a power meter. Power save
three vox level. Bandwidth is wide. It'll do narrow FM. So that's good. Backlight. We went through their d weight. I don't know what that is. Beep, now we can turn that off. Good time out timer, receive dcs, receive CTCSS. That's strange that it's it's set in there. I don't know why that's set in there. That's strange. Transmit is said. Also turn that off. Voice you can turn off and on a lot of people ask about the voice when I do these review videos.
It's got a lot of different things in here. Forty two different menus. Offset is your offset for repeater work. Direction is plus or miners. That's good. Instead of giving you the symbols, that actually says plus the word and minus the word and then none the word instead of zero a positive or a plus symbol or a negative symbol. Channel memory delete channel memory nine hundred
ninety nine memory channels. Okay, so guess what that is? Awesome for a bal Fang nine hundred and ninety nine memory channels that is something I have not seen on a Balfang before. Most of your Balfang radios have like one hundred and twenty eight memory channels. The UV five R, the UV e eighty two, the UV ten R. Believe he even had one hundred and twenty eight memory channels. Your ty T thh three fifty, the UV eighty eight, the RT eighty five from rut of Us. Some of those have
two hundred channels, some of them have one hundred twenty eight. The nine hundred ninety nine memory channels is a feature we don't see much outside of the world of Ocean the Wokson Wuksen Wakson radios. Every time I say ocean, someone comes along and says, no, it's o'shang. Every time I say Oshang, someone comes along and says, no, it's o'shan. You know what, I don't know what it is. It starts with a W.
That's what I know. But those radios, typically your UV eight Delta, UV eight Echo, the new UV eight Hotel, the UV nine series, all the different UV nine radios, those have nine hundred and ninety nine memory channels. But I've yet to see a Balfang with a nine hundred ninety nine memory channel bank. So hey, we're making progress. This is a step up. The Balfang has a USBC charger and it has nine hundred ninety nine channels in memory. I'm not complaining about that at all right now. So
let's take a look further here. Still got a dark screen because of the bright backlight. You can't turn the backlight down. That's really the only drawback I found so far. Alarm mode seek so it'll scan for CTCSS tones, it'll scan for DCS tones. TAIL. I don't know what that means. One thing I just discovered to hold to change from channel mode to frequency mode to VFO. You just hold down this menu button two second press, maybe a long press VFO right there, VFO right there, so you can vafot
like that. Good, Change it back to channel mode, go back into the menu. So oh it started, you know. Okay, So I don't know what tail means. It might say in the manual. I can't imagine something that I would really need that much of, So I'm not going to really worry about it right now. But rpst r PRL Roger. It's got a Roger beat. Okay, we know it's a real radio. Now it's got a Roger beat, received tone, open set languages, English, hopping, our X. I wonder if it has a spread spectrum bandhoppy.
It won't let me turn it on because I'm in memory mode, presumably, or maybe I have to set up a specific channel. So it made have spread spectrum bandhopping. Reset all forty one, sink off and go back there. It did come with the manual, And here's the manual right here. SINC is on enable single band two line display a display alias on the frequency off is normal display status. Gotcha? Okay, So sync changes it to channel seven or frequency. So I turned SINC on and now it says a
frequency on both top and bottom. I turned SINC on and it has a channel number. Presumably you can go in there and name those channels, maybe in the software or something like that. I don't know what that means.
And this tail squelch tail squelch elimination is what tail is. This function is used to eliminate the squelch tail noise between handhelds that are communicating directly with no repeater reception of fifty five hurts or thirteen point four one thirty four point four hurts, tone bursts, mutes the audio long enough to prevent hearing any squelch tail noise. That's what that says right there. Okay, so this manual has a decent description of what all of these menus are. That's good.
I'm impressed with that as well. Okay, so hey, so far, I'm really liking this UV thirteen pro you know, for it for a forty dollars radio, it's about fifteen twelve, fifteen eighteen dollars more than a UV five bar depending on where you find the UV five R and what time you find it. Yeah, that's that's a pretty good, pretty good things so far. So I like all that. Let's go around the sides of it because I want you all to see what it looks like all the way around.
All right, brighten this back up again, so the screens washed out. It's got two buttons above, one button above, one button below the PTT. That's your PTT obviously. Okay, so that's your flashlight. Short press on the bottom button is your flashlight. Long press opens up the squelch just like that. Short press on the top button turns on the FIM stereo. Okay, short press turns it off, long press sets the alarm.
Okay, so that's pretty common. It's got the standard K type connector on the side here, which is where you're inline PTT that it comes with plugs into. You can also put a speaker mic in there. Bottom of it looks like this. That's how you take the battery off. There's the USPC charger. It does have these three prongs across the battery, so it is set up for a desk charger. You can actually probably put a desk charger. Put this in a desk charger. It doesn't it just doesn't come with
it. So if you find something that matches the voltage on a desk charger from another manufacturer, maybe another model of Balfang radio, you might be able to use that with it. I have not looked the belt clip attaches to the battery now I've mentioned in previous videos. I'd rather it attached the body that way. If you buy multiple batteries for it, you can you don't have to buy a separate clip for each one, but on this one you would have to. You'd have to buy a separate clip for each one because
it connects to the battery. Now, which you'll notice first off is there's no FCC approval stamp. Stamp of approval, I should say, this is a CE stamp right here, and C is at least I'm pretty sure that's CE. I've seen that before, and C is the UK version of the FCC, So this might be accepted in England in the United Kingdom, but as of right now, there are no FCC stamps on this radio. So that's take that for what it's worth. So I'm not going to really probably
use this very much. This is a brand new radio again. I got this off of eBay. I will put a link in the description so that you guys can find where it was at the time of this recording. It is thirty nine ninety nine. It's got an h SMA female on the antenna and SMA mail on the actual radio self. So let's put it on the meter and see what it does. To use the trust e MFJA eight forty nine, as I have done in many other videos in the past, and I'm gonna put this thing into VFO mode. Okay, So now I'm at
one forty six five two zero. I know you can't see that in the camera, but you're just gonna have to trust me. That's one forty six five two zero. Wonder if the camera there it goes okay, the camera just if I get it close enough. Okay, So VFO one forty six five two zero. It has as I said a minute ago, it has two power settings, power levels high and low. So on low we're going to be looking at one and a half watts on low. That's where it
is right there. Okay, good, we're going into a dummy load right now. Change the power to high and we're about three and a half watts. Now. Again, this is advertised as quote high power walkie talkie on eBay. And if I look at the eBay listing here high low t X power selectable high power is five watts. Now, I would not exactly call a five white ht high power, but I didn't make this listing, so just bear that in mind. Okay, So three and a half wats one
forty six dot five two. Now we're going to go to four forty I'm gonna go to four forty one zero, four forty one zero. You can see that right there. High power is about two point eight watts YEP. That's high power and about a half a watt on low on the four forty band, so not really performing the way that it advertises it will. But if you've looked at my last few Balfang videos, that's that's become kind of a common thing. It's possible there's some calibration that needs to be done in
this MFJ meter. But if I put my yazoo or my icon on this meter, they read right, is right about what they're supposed to be reading. If I put my UV nine D mate, which is a ten D HT, it reads about nine point five to nine point eight watts. So I'm fairly confident that this meter is accurate because on the higher end radios it seems to read exactly what it's supposed to. On the lower end radios, it tends to read like one to one and a half watts less than what
these radios are advertised as. So do I think this is a good radio? Yes? I do. I really think this is a good radio, at least once it gets an FCC certification. Okay, if they're if they're planning on certifying this specific model. But it's got an excellent menu, it's got nine hundred and ninety nine memory channels, it's got USBC charging compatibility. It has the standard kinwoodport on the K connector port on the side, so you can put your standard ptt earbuds in it, speaker mis and whatnot.
But I think that Balfang is moving in the right direction with this transceiver, and I think it would be I'd like to put it on a spectrum analyzer to kind of see how spurious the emissions may or may not be. I'd like to do some real world testing with it to see what people think about it, but I might wait until there's an actual FCC stamp on it to do that. Maybe we'll do some tests, some dummy load testing with it again later on. I don't know who has this. Have you guys seen
this yet? The UV thirteen pro I think I think perhaps they had a UV thirteen prior to twenty twenty two, but this one's advertised as a new twenty twenty two models, so they've updated something. And quite frankly, it's the first HT I've ever seen from Balfang with nine hundred and ninety nine memory channels in it, so that impressed me. That did that impressed me. I thought it was cool to have that many channels in a forty dollars radio
from Balfang. Let me know what you think about it comment below seventy three and thanks for watching today.