BAOFENG UV-5R 8W Dual Band Two Way Radio (2 Pack) - Upgraded Ham Radio with Long Range for Outdoor, Emergency & Survival Use

This little radio is extremely powerful and has a great battery life (multiple days of standby power if you enable power saving mode and don't transmit) and it has a removable antenna so you can attach something like a Nagoya, Yagi, or custom coaxial antenna to it.If you buy the extended battery or even just another standard battery, you'll have more battery life than you know what to do with, unless you are constantly transmitting with VOX or you're constantly listening to FM radio with the volume turned up!The stock antenna is pretty good compared to the other more expensive Baofengs, but upgrading to a nagoya NA-771 removes a ton of the faint background hiss on both rx and tx, as well as increasing the tx range quite a bit. From my bench, I couldn't really pick up any additional FM radio stations when scanning through the entire FM range using the Nagoya vs the stock antenna, but what I did notice was that every single station came through crystal clear after swapping the antenna, whereas before it would pick them all up but some stations definitely had poor reception unless I would walk all around the garage looking for a good signal path.It has quite a few nice features but nothing digital, and doesn't have true dual watch monitoring, but with TDR turned on for me I'm able to monitor two frequencies and pick which one I care about more so if they're both active it will let me listen to the "preferred" frequency. It has dcs and ctcss codes for accessing those repeaters, and supports DTMF codes for dialing into Internet relay repeaters or echolink repeaters.As far as ease of use, you will need the manual to decipher the different options in the settings menu. There are some websites out there that give a more detailed breakdown of the menu options and their descriptions, as well as youtube videos to demonstrate more complicated things like programming or connecting two Baofengs to make a mobile repeater. Both of those capabilities require a different cable, not included.Finally, regarding programming, you DO NOT need to get the programming cable as you can do everything right from the radio. If you want to look up different frequencies of your local repeaters and store them in the memory channels, you can do that pretty quickly and easily right from the radio once you learn the flow. Where the programming cable comes in handy is when you want to add a hinge number of pre-programmed channels to the radio, but IMO there is no need for that. I tried it with all the virginia repeaters and found that only 1 or 2 ever had any traffic, even when I would go driving for hours and leave it on channel scan mode. Where I think the programming cable would come in handy is if you routinely traveled out of state (like from the east coast to the west coast) and you had a different set of frequencies and repeaters and settings for each location that you wanted to be able to swap between easily. When you go to the west coast you can just backup your east coast profile to save any changes you made or any new frequencies you saved, and then restore the west coast profile so you're able to make changes and save any new frequencies you find there. Then when you're ready to come back, just save the west coast profile to the computer and restore the east coast profile.