BTECH UV-25X4 (Second Gen.) Mini Mobile 25 Watt Tri Band Base, Mobile Radio: VHF, 1.255M, UHF Amateur (Ham)

If you have a vehicle that you would like to install this in but don't have much space, this is seriously the radio for you. It is a very capable radio, yet very tiny. I can literally hold this thing in the palm of my hand. I drive an $800 car so I have no problem drilling into the dash and mounting this thing. There have been a lot of complaints in the reviews and I was skeptical about buying but decided to dive in anyway and I'm glad I did. This radio has held up well within the past month or so that I've used it, I've reached folks about 22 mi away using a larsen tri-band antenna. I'm seriously considering the 50x2 as a base station because this worked to well. As for the complaints... Is there an audible click? Yes. It is insanely loud and annoying? Annoying yes, loud no. I don't use 200mhz so I never have this issue. Is the fan loud? I actually laughed, it's really not that bad. It winds up while transmitting and sounds like a little rc car. While driving, this is not very noticeable and I just ignore it and enjoy my $100 radio. I also read that when using the radio powered via the cigarette lighter, it will heat up enough to melt. This did not happen in my case, however, I wired it up to my car battery for a more reliable connection. As for the programming side, do yourself a favor and download Chirp and use it. Makes this radio SO much easier to program, although you should know how to do this manually. Admittedly, this does take some time. My only complaint is the scanning. I have to enter the freq range I want to scan, rather than just select a band and hit scan. Minor complaint, but just what I prefer. I'd recommend this to anyone looking to jump in and not spend a whole lot of money.

SImple radio, easy to program with CHIRP. Set this up with a Tri-Band antenna for my RV and it works well. Power within a couple of watts of rating. Better with an external speaker, as the internal one is tinny sounding but radio sounds good with an external speaker.

I haven't had any of the problems that others have had with this radio, but I'm using it a bit differently. As I have another rig for 2M/70cm, the UV-25X4 is used exclusively for 1.25M with a monoband 5/8-wave whip. There aren't many options for 1.25M rigs beyond HTs, and I was happy to find the UV-25X4. It was mounted as shown in the attached pic. I bolted the rig mount into an aluminum plate, and slid the plate into a pocket behind the passenger seat, running the power cable to the cig lighter jack. This means that I can't see the display while driving, but I don't care. I can change channels using the mic, and I seldom need to adjust the volume. An external speaker was added using this CablesOnline 6in 3.5mm StereoTRRS 4-Pole Male to TS Microphone iPhone Adapter, Black (IP-MIC2K) handy adapter. No trouble at all. I used a simple inline ethernet cable (M to F) to extend the mic cable. Easy. Since my cig lighter jack is off when my car isn't running, the concerns over "parasitic current draw" never materialised. The programming cable arrived two weeks after the radio, so I had to program most of the repeaters manually. Seriously, it wasn't that hard. I'm baffled by people here that say they couldn't do it. I just followed the instructions. When the cable came, I used CHIRP to add a few other out-state repeaters and the rest of the simplex channels. There were no problems with performance. A few repeaters can't be reached in low spots while driving, but I doubt that more power would make a discernable difference. TX audio was reported as good, RX audio is nice. Since I am only using the radio for 1.25M, the issue of the relay clicks never showed up. While I haven't put it on a good watt-meter, no one I've been talking with has noticed the ten-second drop in TX power. Putting it on a cheap watt-meter didn't show any drop after 25 seconds. I dislike when reviewers attribute quality problems with *their* radio to *all* radios. I had NO issues with intermod, unlike using HTs for 1.25M. The filtering for 1.25M is very good, and I'm using a monoband whip. A tri-band whip is an intermod magnet. No problems picking up engine RFI, in spite of using the cig lighter jack. There are a lot of menu settings, but they are all "set and forget". In using this for two months, I've never had to change any setting. The radio has also been in my car for two months of Minnesota winter (cold!), and it hasn't affected the display or needed time to warm up. Don't know how it will handle the heat yet, but it's not very hard to take out, either. CONS: reverse burst (Menu 55) doesn't work, or doesn't work like the manual says it does. The radio also makes a brief sound like a pinball machine when you turn it on, and you can't turn that off. Adding the programming cable, TRRS adapter, and ethernet extension also added to the cost -- but not everyone needs those, either. As I said, there aren't many other options for 1.25M use -- and the non-HT options aren't nearly as easy to mount as the UV-25X4. I would absolutely recommend this to anyone looking for a decent 1.25M FM rig. EDIT: Put this on a Bird watt-metre, showed 17W and no drop in power after 30 seconds. Product description states 15W average power on 1.25M. Will update after 6 months, but as of 3 months there are no problems with daily use. NOTE: BTECH now offers a 50W amp BTECH AMP-220 Amplifier for 1.25M (220-225MHz), 30-50W Output (2-6W Input), Analog and Digital Modes, Compatible with all Handheld Radios: BTECH, BaoFeng, Kenwood, Yaesu, ICOM, Motorola for this radio. EDIT: I've now had this radio for a year without problems. I use it daily, and I've added a few 2m/70cm repeaters to the mix. Ignore the fear-mongering critics. EDIT: Nearly two years with this radio, in all weather extremes. It still functions great.

This little radio is a gem. I use a cheap power supply I bought off Amazon to power it up to 13.6 V dc. It's my base station although I built a converter from the AC power supply to a "cigarette lighter" supply to run it at home. I wanted a mobile ham radio but didn't want to have to run a cable from my battery into the passenger compartment (I'm not that committed!). Using the cheap Amazon power supply and a female cigarette lighter adapter I put in a little plastic tool box this guy is perfect for my needs. I can use it home and get a very nice signal and when I want to go mobile I just unplug it and my car can handle the 7A draw with no problem. Is this a real hard-core ham radio? No. Can it serve a great purpose in your car? Yes. Can you also use it at as a 20+ watt base station. Absolutely. I have been amazed at how good the transmit power and reception is. I will warn you the "cigarette lighter" gets warm and will need to be adjusted in your home power box. I plan on finding a power receptacle with wires and using those instead of the "cigarette lighter" to plug into my home power base. I can hit repeaters many miles away with this little gem, I also enjoy the 220 bands. There is not a lot of activity there but I plan on changing that and may even host my own 220 net. There's no reason we should give up bands just because the big 2 don't spend any money to make their radios compatible. Is it Chinese? Yes. Might it infringe on intellectual property of other radio companies? I don't know, that's above my pay grade. Can it be a nice base station and mobile station? Absolutely. The power draw is low enough that a car's "lighter" circuit should support it. Overall, I like the sound of this radio and love the low cost.

I have owned this transceiver for 8 months and it has already failed. I primarily use it for listening as I am not a licensed Ham operator. However, I have lightly used it to transmit on GMRS. When I say lightly I mean maybe two hours of transmitting in total. I have other radios I prefer when talking on GMRS so this radio as mentioned has very little talk time. Prior to failure my SWR was 1.01. Last night while trying to reach a party on GMRS, the radio could not be heard. At first I thought maybe I had the CTCSS codes wrong, however they were not. Today I took the time to investigate and found the radio is transmitting ZERO watts. There is absolutely no signal being transmitted from the radio. After doing further research online, turns out the final driver in this unit is prone to failure. Although the manufactures advertises the unit as 25 watts, the final output is only rated at 15 watts. So the problem seems to stem from over driving the final. I reached out to Btech and waiting on a response. I will update on Btech customer service short.y.

This radio works great for the money. I purchased it to use inside my home for talking on local FM repeaters. I already own a couple of Baofeng/BTECH HTs, so I'm already familiar with the brand. I wanted more than 5 watts that you get with a HT, but I didn't need 50+ watts. This radio fits my requirements nicely at less than half the price of a Japanese radio from Icom, Yaesu, or Kenwood. Out of the box, the radio comes with the actual transceiver, a handset, and a DC power cable with a cigarette lighter adapter on the end, along with a mounting bracket and spare fuse. I immediately cut the cigarette lighter adapter off and replace it with crimped-on rings to match my power supply. I don't plan on ever using this radio in my vehicle, and if I do, I will directly wire it into the vehicle's electrical system. Cosmetically, this radio isn't perfect. There are some minor things that could be better. Other people have commented about the cheesy serif font. Also I noticed that if you do a factory reset, it asks you "SOURE?" I think that is supposed to be "SURE?" However, the important thing is that it was easy to configure, and it transmits and receives well. Sending and receiving sounds great, and other people have said that my transmissions are clear as a bell. That is what's most important to me, and for the price I paid, I can tolerate some quirks like the "SOURE?" prompt. I especially like the fact that you can sync the channels so you can see both the frequency and name of the channel you're using, and of course I like the fact that it supports programming via Chirp.

This radio is great. It is unlocked and can transmit on more frequencies than the manual says. It can transmit out of most frequencies listed. Experiment and see all you can transmit out on.

So as a new HAM I wanted to get some entry level gear that would not break the bank. The BTECH stuff is a perfect fit in that regard. Of the offerings the UV-25X4 was the perfect fit for me because it has a simple install being that it can be powered directly off a car cigarette lighter, and its small enough to fit in my small car (Honda Fit w/ 5 Speed Manual) and it had a nice layout, monitoring features, etc. Bonus having the 1.25M (220MHz) as I actually really plan to use that as well. So for the heartburn? Here is the list of things I found to be odd, and/or problematic. 1.) It came with some screws for mounting. Flat tip screws that you would use for through mounting with a nut on the other side and some regular screws with a sharp tip for threading directly into a material. They did not include the nuts to use the through bolts with... Also I think on both of them they were a bit too long to be used in any car without puncturing something behind your mounting point. So this required a trip to home depot to buy some new bolts and nuts to mount the unit. 2.) Advertised quad monitoring (up to) but it really does not work that way in practice. First if you have a 220MHz channel included in any of the channels to be monitored along with the UHF/VHF the relay will click on and off like crazy on this thing, and I am not sure how long that will last before it wears out. Second if any channel is busy, it ignores the others. So if I am on a fairly active repeater, it will never pick up anything on the other monitored channels as it only monitors during a period of time with no other activity at all. It's best to not call this multi-monitoring it's more like "auto scanning" where it will scan up to 4 channels automatically when there is no activity currently on a given channel. Even the dead-space between people keying wont let it pick up other monitored channels as there is a built in "wait" before it seems to go back to scanning. Speaking of scanning, it appears that while scanning even if no activity is picked up it will not monitor any other channel. So forget having your favorite repeater monitored while you scan so that you can pick up a conversation while still listening for activity on your primary channel. It simply will not receive anything or listen to anything while scanning. 3.) My largest pain point. The external audio connection. The built in speaker is better than expected given the small size of the unit. But it's tiny and will distort at higher volume. If you have a loud cabin in your car or poor hearing you are going to probably want an external speaker. For some reason they put a totally different audio out on this unit than pretty much any other radio uses (Including their own 50x2 and 50x3 radios) HAM radio is MONO there is no stereo so the normal connection is a standard MONO TS connection. If you buy any external HAM or CB speaker this is the connection it will come with. Stereo connections like your headphones or computer speakers are STEREO so they come with TRS connections. Lastly combo jacks like usually found on a cell phone combine STEREO speaker output and MICROPHONE input and use a TRRS connection. This unit uses a TRRS connection like a cell phone would have... So they designed it to be a multi purpose jack that could have a microphone, ptt, mono speaker output, and ground. I bought 3 different adapters to make my CB speaker work and none of them did. In the manual it says this connection is compatible with standard TS stereo speakers, but its not! I tried all 3 adapters, I tried my TRRS headphones that came with my phone, and I tried normal TS headphones I use with my laptop. None of them work because this is not a normal pin out for a audio out jack. The unit should have come with some kind of adapter and I really do not understand why they need a microphone input at all. As I messed around with this thing often it would start to send transmissions because it detected some kind of input on the microphone jack so I hope I didn't send any crazy signals over the air. Short of fabricating my own adapter using a pigtail I am not sure what to do with this and a bit grieved over all the time and money I spent on adapters and troubleshooting. I appreciate the support the product has, as every BTECH product I have purchased they reach out to you and ask if it was delivered and if you have any issues. I did contact them about this issue and explain what was going on. All they told me was they gave this thing stereo output so it would be easy to integrate into your car audio system or a laptop. I can tell you. It wont. First unlike a normal TRS or TRRS output with stereo, this connector actually is still mono and they added a proprietary PTT connection. So plug this into your car or laptop with a male to male cable will just not work and will cause undesired transmissions. I'll attach the pin out from the manual as well as a pinout of a normal TRRS connection to this review. I hope they make some kind of adapter and send it to us for free because in its current state the audio out is a lie and not working. It was clearly designed for some kind of device with a PTT feature and not a normal speaker output. Hope this review helps, and I will probably do a video review as well at some point to go into more detail.