In terms of receive strength I have been very surprised at how this very low priced radio from China can compete with many of the more expensive handheld radios from some of the most well known and highly regarded brands. I have put my Quansheng’s side to side and compared with radios from AOR, ICOM, Yaesu, Baofeng, Realistic etc, and in terms of – can it pick up what they can, the answer has almost always been yes. And in many cases it actually sounded better. Even in Airband. Once the Quansheng was modified with updated software, in my case Egzumer, it was just as good as all my other radios, some costing much more at picking up aviation signals.

Baofeng DM-1701 next to the Quansheng UV-K6

Even on sites such as YouTube tell their own story with the Quansheng UV-K models. Go and take a look at some of the comparison videos with the Quansheng Vs a more expensive hand held radio and you will see it can more than hold its own in most cases. Just take a look at the video here where it is put up against the Yaesu FT-1XDE on VHF civil airband, which is known for being really good on airband. I’d say they are both very evenly matched. You would expect the Yaesu to be much better, but it isn’t.

Just the other day I quickly compared my K6 to my Baofeng 1701. I picked up an analogue signal on the Baofeng. It was at 145MHz [2-meter ham], and I could not make out what the people were saying. It was very hissy and broken, but people were talking there. I wanted to compare it on my Quansheng, so I quickly changed the antenna that was on the 1701 over to the K6. And what do you know, the signal was much clearer and I could actually hear what the people chatting were talking about. Which was the usual. How do I sound, the wattage of their radio, what radio they are using, etc.

Now, I know that the 1701 can do both analogue and digital and the Quansheng is analogue only, but I was still surprised at the difference in signal strength and clearness. A lot of the time it is noticeable. And on a side note, the analogue audio quality on the DM-1701 is not that great. I thought it was at first, but more testing has revealed it to be rather poor. Add to that the slight lacking of analogue receive power and its safe to say it is a bit disappointing on analogue. But the Quansheng is quite the opposite.

So in terms of receive strength, an updated Quansheng has been just as good as many other radios. Even not updated with aftermarket firmware and kept with the stock software it was just the same in terns of receive power. And any differences certainly weren’t enough to justify spending much more money on another radio.

The differences were too small. If you’re looking for a handheld radio, with receive strength being one of the major factors, why spend loads of money on a radio when a cheap Quansheng can do the job basically just as well. Fair enough, the build quality of radios such as the Yaesu FT-1XDE is very nice, but the Quansheng’s build quality isn’t all that bad either for the price. Mine are still going strong after a few years of use with no signs of wear.