For the first time in quite a while, I went out for a walk around my town of Glossop (IO93ak) by myself, with just my little Baofeng UV-5R on Saturday night. I was walking for over 1h, at various elevations and was calling CQ on 2m and 70cm, as well as trying to open my local repeaters (GB3WP, GB3PZ, GB3MN, GB3MR) with no luck (of course, the fact that GB3WP was offline, and I didn’t know it, didn’t help!)
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the radio is probably dead (which at ~8 years old, isn’t going too badly!) I’m considering replacing it with a RD-5R which supports DMR, although there’s only one DMR repeater near here, but I don’t know whether it’s worth getting this, or instead just getting a new UV-5RTP (affiliate)?
Amateur Radio doesn’t have a high Partner Acceptance Factor in my house (it’s just not something she can understand why I’m interested), so I can’t really put up an antenna outdoors, nor can I run a mobile rig on the bench in my shared office… I’m half tempted to ditch actual RF operations, and just try using Echolink (or DroidStar) or similar from my phone when I’m out and about.