Hi everyone,?
With the flood of inexpensive Chinese radios coming into the US, I recently discovered the Retevis RT10 900 Mhz 1 Watt Handheld. Now 1 watt isn't the most power, but we as Amateurs have secondary operating privileges in the 902-928Mhz portiin of radio spectrum known as the 33cm band.
As of now if you wanted to play on 900 Mhz, you needed to buy repurposed commercial gear, modify it, and biggest factor is the fact of spending a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars on the equipment to get on the band.
Enter the RT10. Right now they're selling for $69.99 on Retevis website with free shipping. They program similar to most DMR type radios, you need to download the software from Retevis. Word of caution, the software will not work on Windows 11, so you'll need to track down a Windows 10 machine for the programming software. I was fortunate that my Lenovo laptop from 2016 is unable to be updated to Windows 11 due to hardware constraints.? So that is my radio programming laptop now.?
Programming is easy, download the software, hook up the radio to the USB port using the 2 pin Baofeng or Kenwood style programming cable. Run the software, download the current code plug from the factory from the radio, save it for future reference, then program in your DMR ID number, and go to the Zones and start programming the repeater info, ie RX and TX frequency, Analog or Digital, CTCSS Decode and Encode, RF Power Low or High, Signal Bandwidth, etc.
Then write it to the radio after using the Save As tab abd type in your callsign with the radio model, ex. NA1Q RT10 Codeplug.? Then as I change it, I add the date behind the RT10 to show the latest revision of my codeplug incase I need to go back to an older version.
Now there's no display, or keypad, bit it does have voice prompts to tell you what zone and channel you're on, but you'll need a cheat sheet to keep those channels in each zone memorized. I suggest using laminated recepie cards once you are happy with the channels in each zone.
Plus side is this a 900 Mhz ISM radio approved for part 15, not for any other service. Plus side is part 97 allows us to experiment with equipment like this with our Amateur license, making it fully legal to use in the Amateur band.
I look at it as for $70 to add an extra ham band to my station is cheap money, there are 900 Mhz repeaters around the area, the closest to us is Cumberland,? Wrentham, Greenville, North Providence,? and Scituate.?
Also they do what they call 900 Mhz Day on Thursdays to promote the use of the band and run a net on Thursday evenings on the NEAR900 reprater network also.
73 Matt NA1Q
