I loaded F4HWN 3.3 onto my UV-K5 to have a look. It only has 3 scan lists, and it’s awkward to cycle through them. I found starting the spectrum analyzer to be cumbersome as well, since i couldn’t attach it to a long-press of a button. The single VFO view is pretty nice; it puts lots of nice info on the screen, and it’s big. Ultimately, I went right back to AubsUK for the scan features.
Tape Measure Yagi
There are easy instructions to build your own yagi on Instructables. I had just picked up some hose clamps and had the other necessary pieces: a broken tape measure and some 3/4-inch schedule 40 PVC and connectors; so I was ready to build.
The wiring on mine is held in place by the clamps and banana clip adapter. I always like those for prototyping. As directed, I tuned the antenna by moving radiators in and out and measuring with the NanoVNA.
The antenna is noticeably directional, so I can use it to find directions of signals. The S-meter and dB signal strength numbers on AUBS firmware make it easy to evaluate strength and direction.
I transmitted with it to the K3IR repeater as a test during a net.
Aubs Firmware
I’m trying out the Aubs 00.07 firmware on my Quansheng radios. It’s based on the latest egzumer, and so far has kept up-to-date, and it has its own plugin for Chirp.
It has some really cool features for scanning:
- scan on start, a feature I requested of egzumer, but was denied by egzumer.
- 10 scan lists.
I organized mine as:
- 1 = local repeaters and popular simplex
- 2 = all simplex, Ham and GMRS
- 3 = non-local repeaters and other listening
- 4 = satellites
- press
*
to lockout a frequency from scan. - fast scan like egzumer
- frequency spectrum analyzer, but no memory spectrum analyzer like nunu.
This is my daily driver now on both my radios.
FM Bandstop Filter
NUNU Firmware UV-K5 & K6
I’ve installed the NUNU fork of the egzumer firmware on the uv-k6. It has a cool channel spectrum analyzer for super-fast scanning that can see all the active channels at once in the graph. There’s no good way to proceed to the next channel, but that’s not a huge problem.
The firmware also includes some unneeded “NUNU” mesh messaging protocol.
Egzumer on UV-K5
I installed a new firmware, egzumer, on my Quansheng UV-K5. The firmware has some handy features:
- It displays name and frequency at once
- It leaves the backlight on all the time at a lower level
Quansheng Firmware Updates
I flashed minor updates to the UV-K5 using Chromium and https://whosmatt.github.io/uvmod/. This got me the following features:
- RSSI meter
- Mic boost
- Better menu strings
- 18mhz-1300mhz for receive
- Backlight on for longer