u/Healthy-Kangaroo-365

I took delivery of an HA2 a week ago. Very nice looking and feeling piece of kit. I had planned for it to replace my VGC N76 as my daily driver.

I put my channels in with chirp and messed around with zones and settings, as you do when you get a new toy. I found the radio to be very flaky, for example the zone numbering was off with Q not being the first one in the list or perhaps being mislabeled, and not showing up as Q on the main screen etc. I also didn’t have any audio on receive on any of the chirp channels. The green receive box didn’t show up either. When I put the frequency into VFO it worked fine, as when I saved a new channel manually. Mind you, this is advertised as chirp compatible by the manufacturer. It was what got me to buy it.

What I ended up doing to fix the weird issue was to uncheck some boxes in the DMTF settings to disable some features, can’t remember what exactly. So apparently chirp saved some settings into all the channels that neither chirp nor the radio itself could access and fix.

I managed to get the radio into a reboot loop by deleting a zone via the iOS app. It booted up to an apparently non existant channel and promptly crashed. Again and again. So back to Amazon it went for a refund, because as far as i can tell the only way to factory reset an HA2 is via the menu which I couldn’t get to.

I didn’t even manage to have a single QSO on this thing before it bricked itself.

Very disappointed in Retevis for this, I thought they were one of the better Chinese manufacturers.

Pretty new ham here, so I'm still not out of the "CB radio of the ham world" known as 2m/70cm. I ordered a new toy recently, Ailunce HA2. I thought it looked nice and rugged, had good battery life and was waterproof and all that. I got it yesterday. It was indeed a great piece of kit.

It was advertised as CHIRP compatible so I uploaded all my usual stuff to it: local repeaters and some direct channels and marine/pmr for listening. I quickly found out that there was no audio on receive. Put the frequency in the VFO and all was well, but switch to the channel saved by CHIRP and nada. After googling I found out that CHIRP breaks the channel somehow, puts a setting in it that isn't visible anywhere and can't be changed. I unchecked some boxes in the DMTF settings which disabled the whole feature and now I had audio.

There was also a bunch of other flaky/corrupt settings that didn't save properly etc etc when using the mobile app. Misnumbered channel zones and whatnot. I then managed to brick the entire radio by deleting a channel zone. This sent it into a crash and reboot loop. As far as I could make out, there's no other way to factory reset an HA2 besides going into the menu system.

So back it went. Thanks Amazon, your refund policy is great.

Shame, I really wanted to like this HT.

A while back I got a set of ten Baofeng PMR446 radios from AliExpress. I programmed them all with CHIRP, writing the same image to all of them. By "programming" I mean I set CTCSS tones on some of the 16 preprogrammed channels to suit our needs. The channels are fixed, after all. I ended up with only about half of the radios being able to talk to each other, the rest didn't break squelch. As if the CTCSS tones were wrong somehow.
I reprogrammed them again using the exact same settings using the terribleexcellent official Windows software, and all was well.

Just today I took delivery of an Ailunce HA2 HT. I wrote my usual list of channels to it using CHIRP and had the exact same issue. The radio reacts to me transmitting with another HT on simplex (you can see the icon in the top left corner) but it won't break squelch.

I installed the terribleexcellent Retevis Windows software, read the radio, messed with the settings back and forth on the channel I was experimenting with, wrote the settings, no change. Then I added another channel from scratch using the exact same settings and it receives just fine. If I enter the frequency on the VFO, it receives just fine.

What's the deal here? Is CHIRP doing this?