Here's the start of onother project I'm working on. You will see it on field day next month.

If you have a UV5R radio you know out of the box the squelch settings are wrong. There are fixes here and there and do work in a perfect world. However the world is not perfect and for me even less so. I have a cell tower within a block and a half from me and street lights that the city say are not monitored remotely, but are monitored remotely. And then I have all manor of electronic devices around me. So this little radio will waste it's juice airing different radio bursts that I don't really want to hear. So this was my numeric fix for this crappy little radio. So far I'm riding on setting 6 at work.

You'll notice I didn't go to 100%. Yeah after 65% if you're not standing on top of the person you're not hearing them.

Addendum: I call the radio crappy but don't get me wrong. I like this little radio and all it's little brothers and sisters I have in my junk drawer. Best 20$ I ever spent. It got me into amateur radio. And if I loose it, get's damaged or it goes scuba diving in the toilet I truly don't care. 20$ and it's replaced. Just like my budget Craig Action Cam(GoPro look alike), do you want to loose 400$ or 15$ on the milsim battlefield?

This is the first test in the line of probably many. I have spent quite a bit of money playing around with failed antennas. So this time around I'm trying to almost solely use junk to prove it works first. I got a few variable caps from Milton the other day, unfortunately they just weren't big enough for this project. However they do work for fine tuning. The cheapest cap I could find online for power was 55$. Nope, not spending 55$ to find out it really doesn't work. So I came up with this idea for a capacitor. Not sure what it's capacitance is as the battery in my meter went dead this morning while testing it. It currently works only on 20m even though it's design is for 40m. Later today I'll setup in the yard to test it on battery power. Maybe try the LiFePO4 batteries too.

UPDATE:
I did take it to the yard and got one QSO with AF6O in California. That was the point I realized I wasn't feeling very good and packed it all up and went back inside.

Well I will be selling them based on their performance. The job bought me this charger to get them going and tested. Took a bit to figure out as the instructions only covered operation and not connection. On airsoft battery chargers they just plug in on the 5 pin cable. On this it charges from the big cables and little cable do the load balance. Very weird way of doing things but no big deal. The instructions should very much have this picture to explain that. Not sure why the indicator on the charger doesn't jive with the meter I have direct to the batteries.