Baofeng UV-3R: The Cheapest Dual-Band Ham Radio HT

by lOcke

I've recently become a bit of a ham.

I made the decision to pick up a couple of Baofeng UV-3R, two-watt, 2-meter and 70-centimeter band radios after reading a few reviews and learning a bit about them on the UV-3R Yahoo! group: groups.yahoo.com/group/UV-3R

It's a cool radio with the comparable portable ham radios costing $100+ more.  These things sell for $45 to $50 for one on eBay and that's with free shipping.  They take about a week or so to arrive here in the states from China and that's more than acceptable.

I know a lot of hacks have been done with radios over time and even some pranks played on fast-food employees with various ham equipment.  They work great as a transceiver to hit a relatively near repeater or to scan the local frequencies.

I live in a large city so police, emergency response, and taxi drivers are usually what I end up picking up while I scan with it.  I'm not going to go into the details of the radio so much in this article.  My aim is to give you the means to turn this little dual-band HT into a tri-band HT.

From 2 meters and 70 centimeters to 2 meters, 70 centimeters and 1.25 meters.  And what's better than that?  It's accomplished by the laughably easy method of altering a program (.INI) configuration file on the 1.10 version of the UV-3R Windows software that programs the radio via a $10 (or you can make your own - the plans are around the net) USB programming cable.

Yes indeed, frequency expansion can be accomplished with five minutes of work without opening up the insides of a piece of very useful electronics for once!  I felt compelled to share it with the 2600 crowd because I know many of you would find this interesting and pretty much anyone on any budget with any level of technical skill can pull this hack off.

Some of the information in this article is from posts in the Yahoo! UV-3R group, but it's based upon my experience of doing the software mod myself.  Without further ado, here's the soft mod.  Enjoy!

The Mod

This is a software modification that can open up more frequencies.

You may have a slightly different SETTINGS.INI file if you have a different software version or one made for a different radio.  This is the configuration file for the software that programs the radio.

I'd suggest saving the frequencies in CHIRP from chirp.danplanet.com and doing the modification, then restoring those frequencies with CHIRP.  After that, you can read them from the UV-3R software and use that or just continue to use CHIRP if you prefer.

This works for the Vero Telecom/MTC (Main Trading Company) UX-V4 radio as well since it's just a rebranded version of the Baofeng UV-3R Mark II.  I've read that this works on the Baofeng UV-3R Mark I as well, but I've only tested it on the latest version (the Mark II).

In the SETTINGS.INI file for the 1.10 version of the UV-3R software you'll see: [ModelInfo]

What follows the # is the profile name (commented out): # Profile 1

Then you see the data:

# Profile 1
Freq0=[136-174/400-470]
data0=6013401700400047

You'll see Freq0, data0, Freq1, data1, Freq2, data2.

Those are the three profiles, each profile containing Freq* and data*.

Now, the frequency range is easily seen in Freq0 as: [136-174/400-470]

Modify that to reflect the desired frequency range.  You can also do this to set it to only frequencies you need: [136-140/400-410]

Now, you also have to modify the next line to get it to work.

The first line changes the display in the UV-3R programming software only.  The data line (for example data0) has to be modified too.

It's rather simple.  It works as follows.

Looking at the fields for "Profile 3", we see this:

# Profile 3 
Freq2=[144-148/430-450] 
data2=4014801400430045

Looking at the data field, we see this: data2=4014801400430045

When the line is separated, we see this: data2= 4014 8014 0043 0045

Taken apart, the line contents is this:

Freq2=[144-148/430-450]
data2=4014801400430045

4014 = 144.0 MHz
8014 = 148.0 MHz
0043 = 430.0 MHz
0045 = 450.0 MHz

M = MHz and K = KHz

data2 = MKMM MKMM MKMM MKMM

L = Low-Byte and H = High-Byte

data2 = LLHH LLHH LLHH LLHH

If you wanted to set 144.0 MHz, it would translate to: 4014

If you wanted to set 570.0 MHz, it would translate to: 0057

Here's an example of a modified SETTINGS.INI (programming software configuration file).

This is from my computer.  I removed one profile as well as the profile names/comments and my COM port is set to COM Port 3.

[setup]
com=3
searchcom=1
name=0
language=english 
[ModelInfo]
Freq0=[115-400/400-529]
data0=5011004000409052
Freq1=[128-260/390-525]
data1=8012002600395052

Hi to PsyWar & <3 & XOXOXO to Dave & Emmanuel.

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