How to best use a box of Baofengs?
I believe they are all BaoFeng UV-5R+/UV5R.
They were recommended for us when off roading to communicate between vehicles, but never seemed to work great at that.
Somewhere I think I still have the usb programming cable for them.
Edit: apparently the intent of my post was lost in my poor wording of the title. It has been updated to better reflect that I would like to use them, but for what? And how?
They will work well for communication between vehicles, but you need to connect them to mag mount antennas. A car is basically a faraday cage. Radios don't work well inside unless you're running 900 MHz or higher.
Save them for the collapse of society 😅
Done. Now what?
LOL, I’d suggest a USB power strip to keep them charged. If you really want to get rid of them something like a local Boy Scout troop maybe? Obviously they have issues, there might be some other outfit like a local ARRL group.
Well yes, but can they be used as police scanners? Weather update radios? Or are they strictly to communicate with another hand held?
They have a recieve range of 134-176 I think and 420-480, as long as it's standard analog you should be able program in some fun things to listen to.
I have one setup for railroad frequencies and I hear some unique conversations.
My radio dummy tip (I’d definitely not an expert) is definitely go outside when scanning for interesting stuff to listen to. It took me a few afternoons of scanning to find anything, let alone anything interesting. Hopefully you’ll have better luck :-)
Send them to me 😁
We use them for Scout camping, and they work pretty well for that, but we're rarely spread out too far and not inside metal cages
Makeshift Repeaters would be an obvious solution :)
Donate them to storm chasers?
Apart from use as walkie talkies we can sometimes tune in and listen to the ISS as it passes over our location
That sounds neat! Found a guide for it. Also if you use iOS there is a sky app called Night Sky that sends notifications when the iss is about to fly over your location.
https://www.ico-optics.org/how-to-listen-to-iss-on-baofeng/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/night-sky/id475772902