Scotty Perkins says:
"Respectfully, this video addresses some key considerations for using Baofeng in "high-intensity" situations, but it doesn't address arguably the most important reasons for why Baofeng radios aren't suitable for those situations and in fact incredibly dangerous. It's not about analog vs. digital, encryption vs. codespeak. It's about gear that is reliable in emergency situations.
Baofeng radios are so cheap, in part, because they don't have key electronics that filter unrelated RF into the receiver. That means that any form of RF around the radio, on any frequency or modulation, can leave it completely deaf to the communications you need to hear at any point in time. What are RF sources that can cause this to happen? Car alternators. Generators. Power transformers. WiFi transmitters.
Playing this out, you could be hundreds of yards from a power substation, a malfunctioning transformer on a utility pole, or even a mile or more from a repeater site, you could have a completely useless radio and have no idea that's happening. You could even be in a truck with a high-output or malfunctioning alternator and have a dead radio with no warning. You could be standing next to a commercial portable generator with your team yelling at you into their radios and have no idea what's going on.
I'm not making this up. I'm an Extra-class ham and one of the communications specialists in our SAR unit in Idaho and we, like most credible SAR units in the US, have banned Baofengs because we've seen these happen many times. Imagine being with a critical patient coordinating an evac and all of a sudden you can't hear anything your base operation or helo crew is trying to tell you, only because your subject's location is two miles from a repeater site. This happened to us on a live mission. It's very real, and very scary. Fortunately there was another team member with a unit-issued radio that was working just fine and we didn't have an impact.
The other issue with Baofengs is you never know what you actually have in your hands. Baofengs are super-easy to counterfeit, and a significant percentage of them out there are fake. Even if it's a real Baofeng, Baofeng has zero quality controls in their build processes and you may have one of the 10-20% of them that was just built wrong at the factory. That bad quality mostly comes in the form of incredibly low power output that doesn't even come close to the rated power.
The good news is there's a really good solution and it's not that much more expensive. Yaesu makes high-quality, entry-level radios that are under $90 and don't suffer from either of these issues above. They've got proper receiver filter electronics and have a high quality control process, being a reputable Japanese company. The FT-65 from Yaesu is a great radio that does everything the UV-5R does.
In summary, if you had a guy that showed up to training who could have bought a Glock 19 but decided to buy a Hi-Point to save $50, you'd be very rightly concerned about that person's intelligence and sanity. Same thing if you heard from a buddy that he found some slick-looking Chinese vehicle recovery gear with dubious-looking WLL labels and no test data on Amazon and was showing it off to you. Or heaven forbid he brings you a box of counterfeit TQs he got cheap online. This really is the same thing. In the community of people who actually know comms, the images of the Russians in Ukraine carrying Baofengs was all anyone needed to know to be certain that those Russians were going to die, and quickly.
For those of you reading this that may want to say "I've been using my Baofeng for years and never had a problem", that's just the point. You never know when you're having a problem, and unless you're an RF engineer with a spectrum analyzer and a $5,000 test bench in the field, you won't know. You will think everything is fine and won't have any idea things aren't fine.
Please don't choose a Baofeng radio. Find an inexpensive radio from Yaesu or a real manufacturer and don't put your life or someone else's at risk."