Yaesu FT-5DR 5W C4FM/144/430MHz Dual Band Digital Handheld Transceiver

I have a few other ht radios but the FT5DR is radio I reach for when I’m in the field or just taking a walk around the neighborhood. The FT5DR is very user friendly and has APRS. The only reason I didn’t give this radio (5) stars is because of the battery life and it would have been nice to have the desktop charger included.

The Display is very nice. It transmit & recives QUITE WELL.. This Radio has a lot of FEATURES.. BUY one you won't be DISAPPOINTED

NSD wrote a pretty good review and I will echo most of his thoughts. I really like the radio and all of the features. The CAM and Frequency grouping features are great. The band scope is nice and comes in handy when wanting to manually scan what frequencies are being used. When using APRS and sending messages, the ability to do that is easier than a lot of other radios. In fact, the typing of messages is similar to a lot of the early flip phones making sending messages a snap.

Every once in a while, I would accidentally change a mode or feature on the radio and would have to look up how on earth I changed the feature as it was not very intuitive. Now that I know what I did, using those modes and features is nice and handy!!!

Now to the not as nice. The battery life is not as good as I expected and just like NSD said, you cannot tell how far the battery has charged when plugged directly into the HT because the display is so dim. I don't have a rapid charger, so don't know how well that works, but you cannot listen to the radio when it is directly plugged into the HT. Maybe you can with the rapid charger but I don't know. If you could, that would be a definite reason to get the rapid charger.

I accidentally dropped the radio from about 4ft and the radio acted weird and changed modes on its own for about 2 days. After completely removing the battery, pressing the power button to remove residual energy, replacing the battery and then turning it back on, the radio now works normal again!

Overall, I am very pleased. with the radio. The features, abilities and capabilities of the radio are mostly easy to use with occasionally using the manual to find out a new feature.

FYI, I was able to hit a repeater 24 miles away connected to a magnet mobile antenna on my roof with an adapter on the radio so the radio exceeded my expectations in that regard.

Get an extra batter, you will appreciate it.

The first thing you really need to know about this radio when you first take it out of the box is that the US version gives you absolutely no visible indication of its charging state. The manual will tell you that it's supposed to display a bar graph when the included wall wart is plugged in, and it does, but it doesn't turn the backlight on so you can actually see that bar graph. This will likely lead you to believe that either the radio or the power supply is defective, but this is the way Yaesu apparently believed it should be.

Why they believe that likely has something to do with the fact that they chose to ship a 10.5 volt power supply for a circuit that wants 12-16 volts and there simply isn't enough power coming in to the unit to charge the battery and drive the backlight at the same time. Knowing this, you might be tempted to spend the extra money for the CD-41 "rapid" charger, but there is nothing "rapid" about it as it doesn't come with a less anemic power supply. If you stumble upon one of the clones of the CD-41 you might find on another site whose name begins with the letter 'A' you'll get the exact same circuit plus a 12 volt wall wart that actually charges the battery in a reasonable amount of time for about half the price of the Yaesu. You also won't fry the MOSFET if you simply touch the middle terminal on a windy day to boot.

Functionally, it's a pretty darn good radio with a tremendous amount of flexibility but there are so many state-management related UX bugs in the touch interface that I can't call it "great." Also the Bluetooth feature is basically non-functional with any device made within the last ten years and really just should not have been included at all. I got what I wanted for my money and am happy but I still think Yaesu needs to put a lot more effort into their firmware. Especially the process by which the firmware is updated. Why I have to fiddle with hidden dip switches and arcane Windows-exclusive sorcery instead of just putting a simple file on a simple SD card in 2022 is beyond me.