Specs & Ratings
Short Version
A decent offering from Baofeng, the Baofeng UV-22 utilizes their older style UI but still has lots of useful funcitonality and decent TX and RX. It's not the worst radio Baofeng makes, and it's definitely not the best, sitting squarely in the middle of their offerings, but price wise it's negligibly cheaper than the better offerings from Baofeng. Our unit also required some repair right from the get-go, but with these being available on amazon if you get a bad one you just return it right away and will likely get an absolutely fine one.
Pros
- Good form factor
- Better UI than some of the more popular Boafeng radios (way better than UV5R)
- Strong point three.
Cons
- UI lacking compared to many of the best offerings from Baofeng
- Ours needed a repair right away upon arrival.
What is this radio about
The Baofeng UV-22 is a fairly compact radio. It's not quite as small as the UV-5R mini, but it's quite close, and easily in the top 5 "compact" handheld radios available on the market. Sizewise it generally compares to the Yaesu FT5DR, a far more expensive radio. The UV-22 also has a modest waterproof rating, which when combined with a very easy to replace price point and USB-C charging... makes this radio a solid potential candidate for folks wanting something similar to the Yaesu FT5DR size but not the 20x higher price. Unfortunately the UI of the UV-22 is not the most current offering from Baofeng, and thus holds the radio back a bit.
Testing Notes
This radio has been evaluated from the perspective of usage by an outdoor enthusiast, or for use in a utilitarian situation such as disaster relief situation. We generally view all handheld radios from that perspective, save for a few much larger radios that are more of a nice radio to leave around the shop. Given the UV22's compact size and waterproof claim, this radio is surely meant for such a person or situation, and really doesn't seem to make a lot of sense for the radio enthusiast who is largely stationary.
Detailed Review
So right off the batt we'd be crazy to not compare this radio size wise to the Baofeng UV5R mini. We love that radio and we think it's industry leading in many categories. For those wanting a slightly bigger radio though... this is it! It's not a massive jump in size though, and is a perfect fit for many folks. The buttons are also larger, the display is decent and color, and in general the radio is a lot more large hand friendly while still being solidly into the compact category of radio offerings.
We experimented with our UV-22 radio for local simplex group comms while out skiing, and found the radio was superior to the UV-5R mini, but not massively so. The audio quality also wasn't appreciably worse than the Yaesu FT5DR, which given the Baofeng UV-22 costs 20x less boes pretty well for the radio.
Where the radio let us down though was unfortunately the solder joint for the SMA female connection was not as secure on the board, and could flex when moved with the antenna. For most folks this would be as simple as an exchange with Amazon and the next unit would more than likely be fine, but we took this as an opportunity to pull the case apart and asses the waterproof rating of this radio.
We can confidently say: this radio isn't waterproof. It's splash proof if you get lucky perhaps, but none of the radio is terribly well sealed. There are no O-rings... there's just nothing really serious going on to keep the radio waterproof. Now, does this matter very much for the average user? We wager it doesn't, as we've taken for less waterproof radios out in wet snow storms on Volcanoes with no issues. Just recognize if you get this, it's not the kind of thing you can just ignore in a rain storm. Fortunately a small ziplock bag with a hole cut in it will more than suffice to keep this radio alive in a rainstorm!
One thing that really matters to most folks with these radios is that they can be programmed with CHIRP. We were able to easily program our radio with CHIRP using the above settings. Being able to program a radio is essential.
One thing missing from the radio we think is very useful to have is banks functionality. This radio lacking banks is a bit of a downer, but you can always use the classic technique of just treating every 100x channels as a particular bank. 1-99 is LOCAL, 100-199 is NEAREST CITY 200-299 is STATE REPEATERS for when you're traveling... etc etc.
It's also worth noting that our firmware version is pretty low. Perhaps this has been updated since by Baofeng and newer versions of the radio are better. We're also told that these radios can't have their firmware updated either, which is a shame since it would be nice to see what this radio could do with some of Baofengs best UI and features like on their UV28+ radio.
Final Verdict
The Baofeng UV-22 a decent enough radio and quite capable for both it's price point and size. The Baofeng UV-22 can do it's job in the field. We feel this radio best competes size wise with the Yaesu FT5DR for size and outdoor capabilities. While the UI and functionality of the UV-22 are indeed notably inferior, the radio does compete well on price. We still feel the UV-5R mini radio better fits most compact comms use cases better than this radio, or if you can handle a slightly larger radio the UV-7 is a far more capable and robust radio... but at the price point there's really not much to lose, and you can always chuck the Baofeng UV-22 in your car as a backup radio, or gift it to a friend to get them into the hobby.