Abbree Walkie talkies. ?

Keep seeing adverts for the Abbree range of vhf/uhf Walkie talkies and must admit they look great and am sure would work well on 446 !! Anyone here owned one / tried one ? Some even advertise as having speech scrambling with freq hopping . Not sure a radio at this price would have true freq hoping and they have been known to fib with quotes of 20 watt output powers from a handie but interesting all the same !!

Abbree, Baofeng, Fujian, Jiangmen, Leixen, Retevis, Shenzhen, Socotran, Quanzhou, Xiamen, Zhuhai....I've lost count!

Cheap Chinese fun however you look at it.

Victor wrote:

Abbree, Baofeng, Fujian, Jiangmen, Leixen, Retevis, Shenzhen, Socotran, Quanzhou, Xiamen, Zhuhai....I've lost count!

Cheap Chinese fun however you look at it.

Yep very true can’t ever have too many of them at these prices !!
Just wondered if anyone had infact had a play around with the scrambler / freq hop function ?

There seems to be a few videos online showing the voice 'scrambling' function (vocoder/inversion?) but I'm unsure of the 'frequency hopping' facilities. That was only after a quick search never having looked before.

I would have thought that frequency hopping functionality would be a pain (and maybe illegal?) on PMR (Public Mobile Radio) frequencies or even business use due to strict channel allocation, but who knows. (Maybe someone involved in 'Security' services or 'Business' radio would know?)


My main interest is in the fact that these cheap Chinese radios provide a lot of affordable fun for Radio Amateurs covering the 2m and 70cm bands. With the amateur radio services you are not allowed to use encryption for privacy purposes :-

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/62991/amateur-terms.pdf

11(2)(b) - Messages sent from the station shall not be encrypted for the purposes of rendering the Message unintelligible to other radio spectrum users.


I would have likely thought similar legalities would be imposed on any other 'public' radio service such as PMR and CB.


The forum seems a bit quiet at the moment but hopefully someone else may have some input to this.

Okay thanks yep appreciate the poss legalities of such a system in the U.K. was just a bit intrigued by it all especially at that price. !!

Victor wrote:

There seems to be a few videos online showing the voice 'scrambling' function (vocoder/inversion?) but I'm unsure of the 'frequency hopping' facilities. That was only after a quick search never having looked before.

I would have thought that frequency hopping functionality would be a pain (and maybe illegal?) on PMR (Public Mobile Radio) frequencies or even business use due to strict channel allocation, but who knows. (Maybe someone involved in 'Security' services or 'Business' radio would know?)

I had a look at my Ofcom Business Radio licences and the relevant CEPT specifications for approved kit - whilst frequency hopping is going to be verboten as there are a limited amount of allocated channels so it would cause interference, nothing really prevents encryption being used on business PMR on either analogue or digital radio schemes (although in your licence you agree to hand over the content of any messages on request "an authorised officer of His Majesty's Government!" 

I would be surprised if any of the lower priced Chinese radios had anything other than basic analogue voice inversion. Whilst with todays technology it probably wouldn't be that hard to implement rolling code inversion (similar to MASC that the Police sometimes used in the 1990s), it has a range hit (QRM that prevents a code change being transmitted results in a garbled message) and its obsoleted by digital encryption (available on many business radios, albeit at a price!) or the use of encrypted messaging/voice apps on standard mobile phones.

That said, these radios do get used by the uniformed services in many Asian countries, I recently saw a picture of an officer of the Royal Thai Air Force who had one on his jacket, he had just rescued a French tourist couple who had gone exploring in the jungle and got bit by a crocodile (the lass had been taking a selfie, and somehow accidentally sat on a small croc). There is now a sign there in French (and Chinese!) warning tourists not to sit on the crocodiles.

Alex728 wrote:

Victor wrote:

There seems to be a few videos online showing the voice 'scrambling' function (vocoder/inversion?) but I'm unsure of the 'frequency hopping' facilities. That was only after a quick search never having looked before.

I would have thought that frequency hopping functionality would be a pain (and maybe illegal?) on PMR (Public Mobile Radio) frequencies or even business use due to strict channel allocation, but who knows. (Maybe someone involved in 'Security' services or 'Business' radio would know?)

That said, these radios do get used by the uniformed services in many Asian countries, I recently saw a picture of an officer of the Royal Thai Air Force who had one on his jacket, he had just rescued a French tourist couple who had gone exploring in the jungle and got bit by a crocodile (the lass had been taking a selfie, and somehow accidentally sat on a small croc). There is now a sign there in French (and Chinese!) warning tourists not to sit on the crocodiles.

It puts a whole new meaning to taking a holiday snap

Thanks guys after a bit more research on these particular Walkie talkies it would appear that the so called freq hoping feature is in fact just a feature that if you press the feature on one radio the other radio will obviously if within range automatically switch to the same channel as the original radio.

Certainly not freq hoping in true sense !! But guess at the low price it was a bit too much to expect full true freq hop !!