TYT TH-8600 Mini 25 Watt Dual Band Amateur Radio Base, IP67 Waterproof Radio VHF: 144-148mhz (2m) UHF:420-450mhz (70cm) Car Mobile Transceiver with Cable

Good productWith 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.

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

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.

A little to hard to program but ok

It has survived a few power washings and no problem. I’m using in a 2019 RZR XP 4 Turbo.

It took us many hours of playing around to find a youtube video that shows you how to unlock the functionality. For reasons I don't understand, the radio is shipped locked, and nothing about that in the manual. Once we finally unlocked it, it was still a whole lot of screwing around to finally get reception. One thing that is really weird is the squelch setting seems backward. Setting it low prevents reception, setting it high allows communication. Weird, and counter intuitive. Adjusting the settings is sufficiently obtuse as to be impossible. So instead of setting the radio to match the other radios on the net, easier to adjust all the other radios, to match the screen on this one. Somewhere behind that user interface is probably a decent radio. Fat chance trying to figure out how to access it.

I like the radio wasn’t hard to use wasn’t hard to put in. I use it to talk to my buddy when riding trails.