As someone considering getting into this, can you make a couple of suggestions of surplus commercial gear in this price range (ie, under $75)? TIA
Do you need a radio that can be legally transmit on MURS or Part 90 frequencies (land mobile) or just ham radio?
Do you want a handheld or mobile?
Do you object to hardware that uses DOS (preferably running either on a real older laptop/desktop, or perhaps slowed down in DOSBox to program) or needs funky interface cables?
Do you object to something that must be programmed with a computer, and cannot be programmed by front panel inputs?
Thanks again
For Commercial options (you generally loose the front panel programability) so long as you only need the ham bands - Motorola HT1000 (~20 on ebay) (available in VHF and UHF) or for a mobile (could be used as a base or in a truck) a Motorola Spectra (~40-150 on ebay) or GM300 (~50-100 on ebay) - as a note, when buying the commercial radios on ebay, you have to pay careful attention to the bandsplit of UHF radios, many of them are 450-482, rather than the 403-450 we'd want for ham radio.
The thing is, as a radio, the Chinese units are not horrible, they're a world away better than what anyone was using 25 years ago - but they're essentially disposable radios, one drop - and you're probably buying a new one - to give you an example, I own a portion radio fleet that a group of us use for low cost rentals to non-profits, its mostly Motorola, but the Motorola hardware is expensive, so we were looking for a low cost analog only option, and we bought 10 woxun handhelds for our rental fleet, they made it three rental cycles (about 18 months) before all but 2 were dead - in that same period, we had no failures in the Motorola and Kenwood portions of our fleet.
These experiences perhaps color my judgement a bit about the baofengs, woxuns and the like.
