Baofeng (company)

Baofeng radios have been noted for their use in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Radios such as the Baofeng UV-82 have been recovered from Russian soldiers in Ukraine.^[5] Unlike military radios, the UV-82, and other popular Baofeng consumer radios, are not hardened against electronic warfare (EW).^[5]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates radio emissions in the United States, the second-largest Amateur Radio market in the world by the number of licensed amateurs.^[6] In 2018, the FCC issued an enforcement advisory against the sale of two-way radios capable of operations outside of prescribed frequency bands.^[7] This came on the heels of an enforcement action by the FCC against an importer of Baofeng radios, which, at the time, were capable of out-of-the-box operation on a number of different bands not allocated to the Amateur Radio Service.^[8]

In the early 2020s, Baofeng, often tested to be non-compliant with many FCC frequency emission regulations in the United States,^[9][10] began to address these compliance issues. Baofeng models introduced at that time attempted to mitigate issues with spurious emissions that had become associated with Baofeng radios.^[10]