I was looking around the AliExpress App as you do, not really looking for anything in particular, just flicking through the pages. AliExpress was showing me content based on my recent searches. I see an offer for a pair of the Baofeng BF888S hand held radios for £11.50 inc. VAT delivered, and thought wow that’s a steal so decided to make the purchase. AliExpress seem to have the speed of deliveries nailed these days as I bought them one weekend and they were delivered the following Saturday.
When they arrived I was quite taken back for what you get for the money. As can be seen in the pictures below the two radios and accessories come in nice retail packaging and you get two radios with batteries, two antennas, two belt clips, two lanyards and two charges although they have EU 2 pin plugs.
The Baofeng BF88S has 16 channels available, and out of the box, they are pre-programmed with frequencies, which I can only assume are for either the EU or US markets. The BF888S are easily programmed using Chirp; if you have not heard of Chirp, then it is software to easily program channels into the radio without using the menu system and buttons on the radio. I made a simple file so that I could program the radio to the UK PMR frequencies, and as there are 16 channels on the radio and PMR has only 8 channels, I programmed channels 1 to 7 with a tone squelch of 88.5 Hz and 9 to 15 at 100 Hz. Channels 8 and 16 were programmed with no tone squelch, as these seem to be used nowadays like a CB calling frequency.
If you wish to save typing the file it can be downloaded HERE
I first tested to see how much power the BF888S runs on low and high power, I had to programme at least one channel for high power as this is the only way to switch between power levels. I measured using my TinySA into a -40dB dummy load and used 20dB of internal attenuation on the Tiny SA. I used the online calculator HERE to convert dBm to Watts
For High Power 31,9 dBm / 1.55W
For Low Power 19.4 dBm / 87mW
So more testing.
I then tested for harmonic distortion and like all good Baofeng they did not fair well with quite a bad second harmonic.
At high power the second harmonic was 37.6 dB down on the fundamental at -6.3dBm / 234uW and the low power was 30.1 dBm down on the fundamental at -9.6dBm / 105uW. For this reason I programmed all channels to low power as I figured with such a small antenna (almost a dummy load) no interference would be caused
You could programme them for amateur radio use, but you would need a project that matched the limitation of only 16 channels and the need for a LPF to reduce the harmonics.
