I heard bad things about programming the Baofeng and other cheap radios so picked one up before getting blessed by the FCC to operate it. I figured if it was a pain I didn't care about passing some test.

It was a pretty straight forward process. I bought a decent cable to plug it in to my laptop, downloaded CHIRP (http://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/Home) and used it to pull in a list of local repeaters, selected the ones I wanted and dumped the list to the radio.

There was one issue of confusion, maybe this will help someone. The order is important. I've never failed if I: 0) Remove the antenna 1) Plug in the cable to the computer 2) Plug in the cable to the radio 3) Turn the radio on - all the way, full volume Then CHIRP will happily download or upload profiles from the radio.

The UV-82 manual is decent. I'm guessing it is the older models that people talk about. There are some funny translations here and there, but I don't recall anything that didn't work or make sense. Programming them by hand is still no fun. Thank you everyone who works on CHIRP!