Retevis RT-5R Walkie Talkie

Very good radio, excellent value, but bad user manual limits its use – The Retevis RT-5R seems to be identical with the Baofeng UV 5R. The pros: ------------ Good quality feel, high quality communication. Versatile, a lot of features to program and nice extra functions like a torch, an alarm, an FM radio. Long battery life. Excellent value for money. The contras: ---------------- It's such a shame… Read more

that such a good radio is delivered with such a bad manual. It is so bad that making use of key functions is impossible. You will not be able to set up a channel for repeater mode because the manual does not show you how to do it. And figuring it out by yourself will be either impossible or cost you days. I am an electronics engineer and I failed (tried for hours). Fortunately a radio buff put instructions on youtube, which showed the tricks. Completely counter-intuitive. For example you have to enter the repeater offset frequency and then again in a second step you have to enter the other frequency as well and assign it to the same channel. So what's entering the offset frequency there for?

Apart from that it shows that the manual is a translation and it's not a very good one (not catastrophically bad, but the translator was not a technical person).

Also, the units I got, although advertised as "Australian stock" were not programmed to the Australian UHF channel frequencies (and repeater set ups) at all.

The transmit power is 4w according to the manual, but on most online information it says it's 5W.

So if you have experience with radios and are prepared to spend some time researching how to program it, and then some more time to actually program it, then you will be happy with it in the end.