hi this is Scott kilos here six Delta Valve yanking for today's video we're taking a look at the talk about A36 Plus in the last video I did I mentioned that I had an upcoming review on this radio I also mentioned that this radio was amongst a handful of radios that I I actually didn't intend to do a review on because I didn't like the radios um and I don't like reviewing bad radios it's it's a bad look when all you're all you're doing all the time is just bitching about radios and nitpicking and I don't want to be that guy but in thinking about it um I I consider my motivations and my motivations were this I want to talk about radios that are good radios I want to recommend good pieces of Kit um and and I want to I want to make sure that people are are having you know are making truly informed buying decisions and that's that's good and it's altruistic and that makes sense but the problem is just like you can't really tell how much light there is without some Darkness to contrast it to uh you kind of have to if you're going to be talking about Good radios from time to time you also and it's just as important to rather than Point people to Good Care also Point people away from Bad gear so they don't waste their money now for for a lot of radios that are kind of um obscure and not terribly popular it doesn't really matter because the the market is sort of spoken on those radios and for whatever reason they'll they'll die a natural death all on their own but in the case of the talk about A36 I'm seeing a lot of content going on about this radio and one could reasonably assume seeing so much activity on this radio that hey this is something worth looking at maybe I'll grab one of those and especially if they if they've looked at reviews and there's some things about this radio that should be mentioned that aren't um that can further lead people in the direction of making a a purchasing mistake so I thought it was kind of important to get the word out on a couple of things in this radio Unleashed at least someone out there saying hey you need to you need to think about this for just a minute um and some guys have done that in their reviews uh admittedly there's there's some people particularly in terms of the spurious emissions problem with this radio there's a couple of guys that have done some excellent work pointing that out there's a couple of other things about it that uh that I think should be mentioned though that aren't and I'll get to those as we go through but uh and I'll give you one other reason why I was kind of prompted to to do this review I was actually pitched by talk pod to review a talk about A36 a couple of weeks ago and it was right about the time when I was making these these or thinking about this whether or not I should actually review the thing and I I did I declined their their invitation to review one of the radius so I'd already had one for about a month but I did respond with some of my issues about the radio itself and the manner in which it was being marketed and as I predicted to myself talk about never got back to me so um okay it looks like they're they're not actually interested in the constructive criticism that they were actually asking for in their pitch letter but I'm going to give it to them nonetheless and this is the form I'm going to do it in so um without further Ado let's go ahead and launch into this let me let me talk real briefly about how I came to acquire this I we purchased this off of Amazon and from the listing on Amazon which has since Been Changed by the way uh what they offered in the listing was a talk about A36 plus ham walkie-talkie now when somebody says a ham walkie-talkie the assumption is you're getting an amateur radio band specific walkie-talkie they said it was dual band so I'm going to assume it's 2 meter 70 centimeter VHF UHF and they also mentioned it had a 512 memory Channel capacity all right so that's what I got I open up the box and this is what I'm greeted with the Box itself says gmrs portable transceiver and this is designed for General Mobile Radio Service operation says it on this too but when you go to the end tag here right there at the top it says pretty much what is said on the Amazon radio listing A36 plus radio ham walkie-talkie now I can imagine that the reason that their listing got changed is because it's misleading if you get this and I'll show you why in a moment but if you get this and what you get is actually a gmrs radio if you wanted a ham radio you're going to send it back to Amazon they have a pretty good return policy and I'll tell you something being an Amazon vendor myself when your listing is misleading Amazon catches on to that pretty damn quick and they will either fix you or fix it in either either case it's going to get handled so that's why I think their listing has since been changed but to verify what I had I installed the battery and screwed the antenna on turn the radio on and I was greeted with this screen we have an A and A B Band and in there it says gmrs one in the a band and the b band so it looks like a pre-programmed gmrs radio but having seen a couple of the reviews on this radio where the the reviewers got radios that were fully unlocked and would transmitted gmrs and ham I'm thinking well did I get that or is the thing actually locked out to gmrs only if it was fully expanded to do gmrs and ham I guess you could say I did get a ham walkie-talkie that would do gmrs not strictly legal as far as the FCC goes but there's well I'm not going to get into that argument but um I thought well let's test this and the way you test this is you want to go switch from memory mode to vfo and punch in a ham radio frequency well that's easier said than done with the talk about A36 plus because uh look at the front of the radio and tell me how do we switch from memory to vfo I don't know um so one would then of course consult the manual right well the manual is the worst manual I've ever encountered with a radio ever handstand it it absolutely takes the price for being the opposite of informative and a just a waste of time and paper nowhere in the manual does it tell you at any point anywhere how to switch this radio from memory to vfo and that's an important thing with the radio whether it's gmrs or whether it's a ham radio the ability to switch from memory to to vfo is the first step in programming a memory channel from the front panel it's it's a critical freaking thing it's like job two when you're putting together a manual but it doesn't show you that so like any semi-professional radio reviewer what I did was I just started mashing buttons until something happened and I lucked upon the menu button which is the green button if you long press it it will take you to vfo so there's your how to get to vfo on a talk about A36 plus so when you key down you get a an error it's not transmitting so that that tells me this radio is locked out to gmrs however I had already done my research and I already knew that about the same time the A36 plus hit the streets so did the cheat codes and it's pretty well known and if you don't know it you're going to know it now if you hold the PTT down and you hold the eight key down and you turn the radio on you'll see expand and that means the radio is now expanded and it will if I hit the vfo now transmit the ham radio band okay um so that's how it becomes a ham radio so yeah they sold me a ham radio but some assembly required so to speak and not a whole lot of help there now if you are a person who unfortunately fell for the hype and bought an A36 plus and you're trying to figure out your radio I'll give you a recommendation if you go to the talk pod blog they clear up a lot of the things that are missing from the manual in there things like how to switch from memory to vfo I did they know their manual sucks and they probably had to respond to enough um direct inquiries via email that they've set up this blog as a form of an FAQ to figure out the radio so if you're looking for more information go there it's not hard to find just Google it talk pod blog and you'll you'll find a lot of information on the radio in fact I think somewhere in there you'll find the expand codes and if you did happen to expand your radio and you've said hey I don't want an expanded radio in my inventory I want to switch this thing back to gmrs mode only if you hold down the PTT and you hold down the two key and turn the radio on it moves it back to gmrs mode and now it will only function as a gmrs radio so because whether or not a radio is expanded or not there's some people that that don't have a problem with it I'm one of those people and there's some people that do and if you're a person who's a sticker for the rules and I can appreciate that um there you go if you want to just keep it as a dreamrs radio moving forward then fine go ahead and do that but yeah that's uh that's kind of disingenuous kind of slippery but again you're going to get used to that if you're going to be messing with the talk about A36 now let me move on to the next issue and this is sort of where me and the A36 ended so I I go well all right let's go ahead and program this thing up and test it and see what it does now I'll give them credit for another thing they do provide a programming cable with this it uses a uses a standard K1 plug bio-fang type plug I didn't try a baofen programming cable I just went ahead and used theirs but it's not a bad programming cable when it comes in the Box along with a cradle charger for the radio and a couple of other widgets I think it has a lanyard like most of them have that nobody I know uses but there you go some guys do I guess um but I go to program this up now there's two ways to do this you can use the factor the talkbod factory CPS or customer programming software or you can use chirp the factory CPS is awful I didn't expect anything better than what I got but fortunately the new version of chirp whatever it's called chirp new or chirp next or whatever um there somebody did some somebody put some work in before this radio came out because man that is that is a fully featured um uh chirp file right there or whatever they call Chirp build uh anything you want to do with this radio in terms of programming it with a computer can be done with chirp so I recommend you go go in that direction so I start programming now I want to I want to take you all the way back to the beginning with the the Amazon listing and they mentioned 512 memory channels and like I said this is where me and the talk about A36 ended and I I got pissed and I raged to quit um and this is the one thing that I don't hear any other reviewers talking about because they'll be talking about the general specs of the radio and they just throw out yeah it's got 512 memories and they're on to something else if somebody did it uh I apologize for not having seen your video but I've looked at enough videos on this and nobody brings this up I go to program this and I'm in chirp and I start programming from the first line and I I'm zipping through and I go man I'm gonna be able to put a lot of stuff in this radio so I can at least say that right so I get to line 256 of Boom dead end 256 so I'm thinking well maybe they haven't broken up into two blocks I know for instance the Icom ict10 does that with its CPS they have channels 0 to 99 and then um 100 to 199. and in an A and A B Block I don't know why they do that but they do so I thought maybe that's what's going on because I've heard some references to 256 in the a band and 256 in the B Band because if you ask tokbot hey you said 512 memories what's the deal they say well there's 256 memories in the a band and this 256 memories in the B Band where's the B Band where can I program those those additional 256 memories in so that I get my full 512. well there is no place to program those memories in this radio has 256 memory slots available to it that's it there are not 512 memories on this radio 256 and to be completely honest with you for a radio that comes in at this price point with a color display some issues that I'll get to in a bit but 256 is is fine you didn't need to do this but here's what they said here in this is what they tell you the way the two the where the 512 comes from is you have 256 memories that you can view in the a band which is this upper block and you can view the same 256 memories in a b band so you have 512 memories that you can look at well if you're going to follow that logic what I'm going to tell you is your radio doesn't have 512 memories it only has two because you can only look at one channel at a time on the A and the B Block so if you're going to follow that logic of what you can see from the A and the B is either two channels or just the same 256 if you were scanning there's not 512 memories and that is just you know and look if you read their blog you'll see them talking about this and it literally is like watching somebody who tried to nail Jello to a wall the slippery euphemistic soft language they use is ridiculous and when somebody does that and they try to hit you with something that's a little shammy and scammy what they're telling you by doing that is they're saying to you to your face I think you're stupid enough that I can sneak this by you that is one thing one of my hot buttons you start playing like that it's game over time nothing you say moving forward I will believe listen to or or take with any degree of credibility and if they were just honest with it and they said hey it's like this you got 256 on top 256 on the bottom they're the same 256 but it gives you the availability even then there's no way around it just say it's 256 and move on you'll be fine and and it doesn't create the speed bump it doesn't create this this moment of distrust between the customer and the manufacturer and that's what talk about is doing by doing this stuff and whenever a company is doing this it is a giant red flag for me um I don't do business and I'm a businessman I I I am half owner of a company that manufactures products and sales people and this kind of behavior believe it or not has kept me from being a rich man it's the reason I drive a 20 year old truck is because I refuse to play on that level and I refuse to play with people that play on that level uh it's it's dishonest and again it is cost me and my business partner huge huge amounts of money in in cutting ties with people that were shady and disingenuous because we didn't want to be those people too so I don't do business with companies that do that and I don't recommend the products of companies that do that so that's kind of where why I stopped with the talk about A36 I didn't want to give them any Oxygen whatsoever but what I was faced with is the fact that a lot of people are and a lot of people are buying this radio thinking it's going to be okay or good to go and what they're getting is just a lot of nonsense now it's not a completely horrible radio that's not usable but at the same time it's it's not the Innovative new product a lot of people make it out to be about the only thing I can say in the positive on this radio is the display I like it but I'm going to be showing you a radio in about a week that's less expensive than this uh hell it's a 25 radio that has the same display so it looks like that colored display with a black background is a thing now with these uh with these cheap Chinese radios so you're going to see everybody doing it so that doesn't make this radio particularly special it also claims some other things regarding air band I'm going to tell you given this antenna the airband reception on this radio is not good you can get some air band reception if it's right on top of you I live I kid you not a mile and a half away from an airport and I can barely hear the air traffic with that antenna I put other antennas on it didn't improve much uh it'll get it but it's not great because you're asking a radio that's basically a chip on a board cheap Chinese radio with a direct conversion receiver you're asking that radio to receive both FM and AM because air traffic you're talking 128 megahertz you're getting down in the AM band it's not designed to do that you can make it you can get it to squeeze in there but it's not going to do it very well at all so if you're looking for an airband radio there are other ways to go there are some there's some AC radios out there that are inexpensive enough of hell and ft60 buy an ft60 and call it a day because you want air band you want all kinds of crazy stuff you want the best receiver in the world go that direction if if you really want to start getting into more expansive use of radio you need to be looking away from the cheap Chinese radios you need to start saving your money up and buying a decent radio in order to do that but we're going to continue to see people rolling with the the air band and calling that a thing and it's not real good um this does have it's hitting all the the buttons that everybody's calling for it's got the USBC charger which everyone seems to be just every you say USBC charger and you can sell somebody a turd with a PTT button on it it's so long as it's got USBC okay um that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good radio the PTT is super duper sensitive the antenna already sort of alluded to but it's not good the reception on this radio is not good the quality of the speaker is not terrific it's very generic the belt clip is the belt clip is awful but it does have the uh the cool little detach feature which that seems to be a new thing now so you can unclip it like the icoms and all right I I guess but it's not uh it's not a particularly good belt clip to begin with like I say a lot of a lot of sideways displacement is very flimsy and it does look like it's going to snap pretty quick the battery is suspiciously light I'm holding this in my hand and it really feels like there's nothing inside of this case I know there's a battery in there the damn radio works I don't know what they're doing with this now what do they say it is they say it's a 1500 milliamp battery which isn't terribly large they do sell an expanded battery for this um but again that's putting lipstick on a pig so I don't know if we necessarily want to do that um did I mention the PTT being very sensitive um if I didn't I'll mention it again you barely bump this thing and it will transmit it does have side Keys they're probably programmable I couldn't tell you what the programmable to do because a manual doesn't tell you that either the FP or the front panel of course we know this is a complete mystery that you're going to have to figure out although you can switch from the a to the B Band they do give you that you do have a menu key and you do have a menu that does have all of the functions you're going to need to do programming and then you've got an exit key Channel up and down um typical cover with a typical K1 type plug here all right and that's kind of about it really um it's again not terrific now I'm going to talk about the very last thing on this is this is actually going to cover information I've received from other reviews I don't have a commercial grade service monitor Spectrum analyzer so I can't show you this for myself but I will report that what I have seen other people that do have that equipment show is that this thing horribly fails when it comes to spurious emissions which is not a surprise for a cheap Chinese radio most of the baofangs don't pass the test either but it's something that you need to know yes it's a gmrs radio that can be used for ham but if you're using it for ham the chances are are pretty good that you're kicking out spurious emissions that are loud enough to hear well up the frequency spectrum in areas where maybe you don't want people to be hearing your Transmissions or maybe they don't want to be hearing your Transmissions that's something to be aware of but overall top to bottom side to side I can't in good conscience recommend the A36 plus to anyone it's a it's a flawed radio and it's a radio that's being marketed by people that engage in disingenuous and dishonest business practices so with that look there it is and I'll add one last thing when we're talking about we're really sank home the dishonest and disingenuous business practices if you look up the FCC ID on this radio because as part of solving the mystery and whether or not this is a ham radio I looked up that FCC ID number which is the uh right here 280qz gmrs one and I wanted to see what did talk about tell the FCC they were doing and just to let you know and you can look it up yourself on the FCC website they said this is a a radio intended and designed for gmr for the gmrs band They also attest the radio cannot be modified by the end user for expanded transmit via the use of software now of course if you're using your fingers they may be buttery soft but they're not software so just using your fingers to press the PTT and the eight obviously expands the radio so yeah slippery disingenuous oh well if I didn't mention that I might have mentioned that earlier not totally sure getting to the point where I'm wrapping this up but with that I'll bring this to tune in to just say look my recommendation is avoid the A36 plus there are a lot of other radios within the same price point that are better than this all day long there's nothing particularly special or Innovative about this radio even The Styling is kind of yeah uh it it the look doesn't appeal to me at all it's uh just kind of bland and there you go so A36 plus thumbs down you can do better and with that I will bring the student in but my next video I am going to be talking about something pretty darn cool and for the next few uh videos you're going to see some some pretty cool radios and I'm going to actually kick off a couple of operator series I still need to wind up the vx6 operator series but I've got a couple of others that I'm kicking into the hopper that people have been asking for so that's about it I'm going to go ahead and bring to a close at this point thank you for watching and or listening this is Scott kilo cr6 Delta Alpha Yankee for Southwest Visalia California have a wonderful day