AnyTone AT-D878UVII Plus – Dual Band DMR/Analog 7W VHF, 6W UHF Handheld Radio w/FREE $97 Training Course – Bluetooth PTT, Digital/Analog APRS RX & TX - 500K Contacts Plus Great Support from BridgeCom!

Seems to be a very good radio that comes complete... For first timers, you need to join the ARRL... There are clubs everywhere that can help. I would highly recommend visiting a club and someone will certainly greet you and lead you in the right direction... Don't always think that a Cell phone will be there for you.. When Cell Phone Towers go down, those Cell Phones are useless.

Great little radio with lots of memory and features

Very good communication radio for emergencies in the area .Easy to operate after you upload the frequencies. A must for communication between the emergencies agencies.Price wise is great and supports from the company.

Great radio with lacking APRS functionality. If you are looking for an APRS specific radio, this isnt it. But, if you are looking for a DMR radio that sometimes works on APRS, its a tank. They've pushed out firmware trying to increase the capabilities of the radio while simultaneously breaking already functional features. Out of all of my radios, the Anytone 878UVII plus is the least capable for messaging, position reporting, or reliable packet decoding. For a DMR radio though, I have dropped it, left it in the heat and cold, and gotten it wet. The battery life is astounding as is the audio quality. I would buy this again without the classes from bridgecom and certainly dont give them your email unless you get lonely and enjoy continued marketing from them.

I love this radio

I'm an IT guy of over 35 years, and I learned things quickly. This is the craziest radio to try to learn to program it set up, and I haven't even gotten to the DMR yet. I'm just trying to set it up for analog, GMRS, repeaters, etc.. however I worked with a friend of mine and once we figured this baby out it was nice. It has awesome features and options - APRS, GPS, configurable roger beep sounds, and options out the wazoo. The digital is superb! I am loving it ... that is until today!I woke up this morning and pulled it out of the desktop charger and turned it on ... my daily routine. Only this time I get a message "Book Empty!"Nothing worked right when I tried to select Zones or change channels ... it came back up with this error. I tried resetting to factory and dumping the codeplug to it again. Same thing. It's basically useless now, and I've only had it running for maybe 3 months!!!SUPPORT: non-existentI tried contacting AnyTone ... they will allow you to eMail, but no phone support or assistance, and if you did call them it's in CHINA!!! Would I get it again? Probably not ...I have a very small tolerance for things that fail easily.When this was working, it was awesome, great sound, works superb with the bluetooth features, and APRS was spectacular. The configuration choices are phenominal. BUT ... if it doesn't work, all of these are placebo ... empty, useless.DO NOT BUY ONE.

The media could not be loaded. I picked up the 878 after only using baofengs for about 4-5 years. The learning curve is much steeper than baofengs but not impossible if you’ve already used programing software like chirp. My recommendation is download CPS (Anytones code plug software) and play around with it while you wait on your order. The class can be helpful if you’d rather just take the slow and easy option but be proficient by the end. It’s included regardless so it’s a good add-on. My main complaint is the analog reception, squelch is only able to be changed with a range of 0-9 zero being a full open and 1 being well, a bit more than you want. The issue I run into is the squelch will turn on and off somewhat randomly, not bad enough where you don’t hear anything but you will have to fill in some blanks if you’re not using a good repeater and antenna.You can and will pick up analog clearly but antenna choice is very important. A stock Baofeng UV5R will pick up whole transmissions at its stock 9/9 squelch will pickup more of an analog signal than the 878, but with that being said it is not the focus of the HT. Where it excels is battery life, audio clarity (receive and transmit) and customizability. A baofeng will allow you to put some text, the 878 does text or full color images. The 878 has 15 base button binds that can be changed in software or on the HT. APRS receive works but is significantly easier to setup on a pc. Reception for analog APRS seems to be more consistent than voice but transmission and a bit odd since it waits for dead air and if there’s someone talking when it would send it seems like it just waits again. So if you’re on a busy channel APRS may not transmit on the separate frequency, I do not have a second radio capable of verifying that it is the same for APRS on simplex voice frequencies but it seems to be better when APRS and voice are being used on the same frequency. The digital functions work as expected, I’ve made 100 mile line of sight contacts with my local repeater on trips on analog, so unless you are looking to spend about twice as much on a HT this is about as good as it gets. Any cheaper (besides the $250 blue button version) radio will feel a bit limited. Having the extra capacity to fit the whole DMR contact list is definitely worth the headache of making your own. The video attached is recorded 7 miles from a repeater in a parking garage with no direct line of sight and large concrete buildings between as well. Does not show the cutting in and out analog can do but that should show how picky I am about it. Build quality 9/10 analog reception 7/10 Audio quality/max volume 10/10 start up wait time for a DMR HT 9.5/10 Learning curve for new HAMs 6/10 (without using the included course) over all 8/10 for analog use 9/10 for DMR

Very good radio for someone who is interested in DMR and analog at the same time. This radio has a lot of features that work well.