TYT TH-8600 Mini 25 Watt Dual Band Amateur Radio Base, IP67 Waterproof

A little dificult to program but works well once set correctly. You may need to look online to get clear instructions. Quite a small unit fits in my battery box as part of a GO kit.

Works great

Great radio very easy to set up and program. Speaker is loud, no need for an external speaker in our SXS.

This was the only dual band VHF/UHF radio I could find that was waterproof. Initial impressions are good. It is small, seems sturdy, and comes with a well-fused, waterproof power cord. Both of the battery ends are fused in-case the power cord shorts out. The radio end is also fused. The included programming software and cable worked first time for me on a windows 10 tower computer, and it wasn't bad using cut & paste to program from an export of my Baofeng CHIRP config and seems to work fine for both Simplex and Duplex communications. It would be great if CHIRP supported this radio but that is on the CHIRP dev community, not TYT. Installation was straightforward and just like any of the other mobile transceivers I have installed. On the whole it seems well thought-out for its primary use in recreational or farm vehicles. It is a good value and I took the 3 year Amazon warranty for $20 just-in-case. Only a few things stand out as issues. First is that it came locked without any obvious documentation explaining how to unlock it: Hold the "LO" (top left) button and the "A/B" (bottom right) button while turning the TH-8600 on. Also, the default for the microphone up/down buttons is volume, not channel or frequency as I have come to expect. It may be possible to change the default but I haven't figured it out yet. The manual is reasonably good for a Chinese radio but does fall short on some of the important details describing various functions and abbreviations.

Good product With clear reception

I bought this to be a waterproof version of a no longer available Rugged Radio as it fit my dash mount. I programmed it with the Rugged radio channels. I haven't used it yet on a ride but I expect it will be fine.

The cord sent with the radio to allow easier programing doesn't connect to the radio. My buddy used his cord to get me started but I can't find a similar cord to replace my new one so he is required to add any frequency. The free software is worth every dollar you spent because will not accept data entry. THERE IS NO WAY TO CONTACT THE VENDOR IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM because both phone numbers listed on the back of the instruction manual and box are not good.

Excelente radio, fácil de configurar, compacto, liviano, pesa muy poco, trae todos sus accesorios, nos encantó