Are you sure the other radios have the same frequency programmed? My guess would be the radio you tried to talk to still had factory frequencies. But I'm no radio expert and I could be wrong.

I was at a big event. I supposed that they had the good frequencies. :|

Getting your radio to work with others is more than just tuning to the right frequency. There are other settings like the offset which tells your radio what frequency to listen on vs. which one to transmit on.

I suggest either learning to program your radio manually by following a guide (there are dozens on YouTube) or going out and buying the programming cable and using chirp software to set up multiple channels.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

I highly recommend chirp for any amateur radio user. You can actually see what you are doing and using a keyboard is much easier than navigating the tiny buttons on a radio to program

just do a google search for chirp radio. It gets regular updates for pretty much any radio manufactured today

Problem is CHIRP doesn't seem to support my radios. Two Baofengs, a BF777S and a BF-F8+ and CHIRP doesn't see either.
Then again it's recently come into question about the quality of programming cord I have. AliExpress, y'know...

Probably the driver, not the chirp software. If you got a no-name programming cable like I did, make sure you aren't using the drivers that come with the cable. Windows also doesn't grab the correct driver by default, you will have to tell it which driver to use every time you plug in your cable.

There should be a YouTube tutorial out there explaining how to set up the correct/older driver.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

Error messages or just "nothing"?

Make sure you download and use the driver I have highlighted:

http://i.imgur.com/xsZRw9B.png

Can be found on this page: http://www.miklor.com/COM/UV_Drivers.php

That page has a thorough step-by-step. Has always worked for me. Just make sure you know what USB port you plug in to: COM1, COM2 etc...

When you open Chirp you'll want to "Download From Radio". As long as you have the right driver, or the proper USB cable, there should be no problem.

Thank you for an excellent, straight-forward, informative read.

Great article, thank you Cobrajr122!

its working