[x62Bh7948f]

There was a more or less visible campaign against Chinese made radios recently in Japan (mostly due to transmitting without a license and also the fact that the transmission itself caused a lot of noise in a wide spectrum. I’m not a ham but I’m interested in radios, so my terminology and what I understood about the “offending” transceivers might not be accurate) The popular Baofeng UV-5R (or a close model/clone) is available at Amazon and Rakuten, but I got cold feet about buying one of the noisy units and be visited by the Radio G Men. The price of Japanese made units is 5 times more, but on the review sites I consulted, they all agree the quality is worth the price (I looked for Yaesu units). Related: Japanese news segment about illegal transceivers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNGSJFSMvlA

[cdchn]

I don't know how it is in Japan with how fervently they defend spurious transmission but in the US we have people doing "key down contests" which is the radio equivalent of "side shows" or / road takeovers and there is barely any enforcement against them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef6z3MaLOrU

[ajsnigrutin]

Yep, there's a subreddit for baofeng radios on reddit, and probably 3/4 of posters there have no licence at all and just bought the radios because of the combination of being cheap and the ability to get "tactical" variants (camo colored, useless huge antennas, etc.). They usually have no idea how to program the radio (input frequencies/channels) and just use the preset ones which are set to seemingly random frequencies, sometimes even outside of ham bands.