Wouxun KG-UV3D

Pronounced Woo Shun for those who cares.

My personal thoughts and opinions.
Almost one year ago, I was at a ham radio meeting, the reason why I know it was a year ago was because the meeting is held the 3rd Sunday of the month and the last meeting was yesterday.

A fellow ham came to the meeting with his new prize possession radio.
Basically it was about $125.00 at the time for the radio and another $60.00 more or less for the accessories - which he bought nearly all of them.

It had a radio, a microphone, a mobile charger, a wall charger, a antenna adapter, a second battery, a programming cable, the program to program it with your computer and a couple more options I can't remember. Maybe even two different rubber duckie antenna's. $185.00 out the door and shipped to his front door.

I was more interested in the box it came in.
Each and every cubic inch inside of the box was utilized.
Showed that these people were serious about making and selling radios.

A couple of months later, at the first Butler Hamfest, the people who called themselves hams - went in their own little groups and I went by myself.
Not what I would call a particularly friendly bunch - especially when we were all club members.
Anyways the one club member that is more involved then the rest in radio, actually works as a sub contractor for the state - bought one on a whim.
He figured that for $100.00 he couldn't go wrong.

So Steve bought it and took it home and started to play with it.
He put it on the service monitor and he got out the Part 97 / sub part 15 specifications for a hand held amateur radio and also the book which came with the radio and the specifications listed.

His radio, on the same service monitor he uses to test state owned equipment, meets or beats the published report and specifications, along with the specifications listed by the FCC for a device of this type.

As far as durability goes, you would need a second battery.
Battery life is determined by how much you use it.

The only thing I can say, and this is two fold is that the handheld is not going to replace a mobile or base station radio.
Anyone stupid enough to think that a hand held radio is all the radio they need to call themselves hams - is a idiot.
If you had to rely on this radio, as your only source of communications for Ecom - it isn't going to work.

There is a group of people out there right now who actually isn't very smart.
They think that because their cell phone works on much of the same principal and that it is all that they need to communicate that a walkie talkie works on the same principal and that they can save a whole lot of money - vs buying some type of base or mobile radio for several hundred dollars and buying 50 or more feet of good coax and some type of base station antenna and mobile antenna and a power supply and all the items needed to be what I would call a real ham.

Using Greensburg Kansas as a example, when the tornado wiped the town off the map - the cell phones didn't work and the amateur radio repeaters didn't work and there was no electricity and there was no gas station in town to get extra gasoline for their generators and when the batteries in the radios went dead - that was it.

Another example was hurricane Katrina.
When the flood waters wiped out everything, everything quit working.
If you have a 40 - 60 watt radio and some type of antenna and a automotive battery, you can pretty much transmit as long as the battery holds out. Even when the battery goes dead, you can always take a car battery out of a vehicle and replace it and charge it with the vehicle, and if the flooding is severe enough and there is abandoned vehicles - you will always have a supply of automotive batteries and the radio will talk relatively well for 1 - 50 miles depending on terrain.

Is this radio ok for public service events and communicating between hams at a hamfest - of course.
Is it a reliable source of communications for a ecom disaster - never.

As long as this radio is used in the way that it was designed to be used, it will work wonderful, as long as you use it and keep the batteries charged.
If the battery fails - you now have a $100 ornament or will be tied to a umbilical cord - power supply until you replace the battery's.

The bottom line is - there is only so many manufacturers out there that makes ham radio equipment.
Eveytime you buy one of these new radios, you take money out of the pockets of the other manufacturers.
This in turn causes the manufacturers to do one of two things.
Either they can sell their product for less money.
They can figure a way of making it cheaper.
Or they will stop putting money into research and development and eventually when they have to abandon the hand held market, the new kid on the block Wouxon - will raise their price to be as high as or higher then the price of the competitors radios - before the new kid on the block came along.

Each and every time this cycle repeats itself, one of two things is going to happen. Either the ham radio community will come to accept that this is the way it is going to be and just accept that if they want to buy a new radio, they are going to have to lower their standards and buy this piece of crap, or they will have to be willing to pony up more money to buy a Icom or a Kenwood or a Yaesu.

Here is a link for some pictures of Greensburg KS
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&s...ult_group&sa=X