This dual band radio may be of some interest to those who do 2 Metres. This radio has APRS and Bluetooth connectivity, which means you can use it to connect to an android device and use APRSdroid, so you can spot yourself via APRS2SOTA. Currently being sold on Aliexpress for £122.26.
Josh KI6NAZ reviews this on his youtube channel
What’s the most important feature, the radio performance, like? Loads of handheld radios are on sale but most have mediocre radio performance at best and some are terrible. Especially for SOTA.
This is the thing I cannot find a single user of this radio in the UK! Going from what is on youtube from the United States, so we know the APRS and Bluetooth functions work fine with aprsdroid. But at the end of the day it is a bog standard FM HT, I would assume it is better quality than a Baofeng but only once it has been tested will we know!
Would I buy this radio, do I need this radio? I have to admit I am tempted, however, I was messing around with my Anytone D878UVII Plus last night with Bluetooth and managed to get my Android phone to connect via Bluetooth and APRSdroid was happy to show me it was connected, I just need to get the firmware updated properly so the APRS works again! So there you have it the Lanchonlh for me probably would be redundant even before I had bought it.
I also have a cable coming from Germany to connect my FT-818 with the Mobilink, there is a functionality problem with this option as I would need to spot on 2M APRS and then race down to whatever HF band I wanted to use. What I have noticed is though that people are calling me the moment to spot goes live! Maybe this will work maybe it won’t but having a separate HT with APRS seems a better option to me.
I will see if I can get a definite answer about the Lanchonlh performance, however, we know it’s not going to be in the same league as a Kenwood or Yaesu FT-3DE or FT-5DE
I think that seems a reasonable view. I’m spoilt because I have a 2m FM handy that is almost bulletproof on summits with other commercial sites present. The kind of location that kills all the Baofengs and many Big 3 handhelds as well.
There are 2 antenna sockets. Program one socket for 2m and the other for all the HF bands and use a memory for 2m APRS frequency and mode. Hit the memory button, radio goes on 2m, send APRS data, hit the memory button and radio goes to HF ready for you to operate. Probably takes longer for me to type that that to actually do it in practice.
I was thinking there are probably practical ways of dealing with it, I never really use the VFO on the FT-818, but I do with the Anytone without thinking about it!
I have found the Sotabeams bandpass filter useful at places like Bardon Hill apart from the HF part of the AZ (Pager signals destined for the hospitals at Nottingham go directly through this area) as the Commercial Radio site may not be the tallest but is absolutely festooned with Pager antennas and microwave dishes. The only problem with the bandpass filter is it is limited to 5W output.
I remember years ago a friend made a cavity filter for 2m based on cocoa tins, not as portable as the Sotabeams filter but capable of taking high power if you ever need to go QRO!
The insertion loss is pretty bad too, 3dB from memory.
I solved both problems by using a small linear after the filter. 2 watts from HT gives 1 watt into the amp and about 10w out.
Yes, I wasn’t aware of the insertion loss, only told about it last week. Trying to find a small linear is going to be a problem, I did see about trying to make one but it turned out that you can’t get some of the components for the particular design. A far cry when I was doing the intermediate course when the recommended project was a small 2M power amp
You’re a radio ham… just make a bypass switch so you can switch the filter in and out of circuit.
I have a home qth problem on 2m with two Arquiva masts within a mile or so putting about 20mV of RF on 140 MHz and 153 MHz down the coax. I have a substantial cavity filter to get rid of those - and before anybody complains that I should be using something more bombproof as a RX front end, I am!!
RF paging close to the amateur bands is just one problem we have to contend with - now how do we get rid of the RF c**p from other houses???
Now that things are getting back to normal-ish, try looking at club junk sales and rallies, lots of oldish Japanese little amps around like the Microset RV-45 which is currently on Ebay, the pre-amps are mostly rubbish but the amps are okay as long as you don’t overdrive them.
That is the 64 megabuck question. The situation here has got so bad that at times I consider giving up on ham radio and going back to astronomy - oh, wait, the new street lights and the neighbours security lights make the stars invisible! 
I hope you have quiet neighbours!
