This is the Kydera DR-880UV Plus, also sold as the Radioddity GD-88.
The housing has some very minor differences between the two
but they’re the same radio inside, so what I’m going to say in this video applies to both.
From what I’ve seen online, Kydera has been selling this radio since 2020,
but Radioddity has only started selling the radio in the last few months.
There aren’t many reviews of the GD-88 out there at the moment (and almost none of the Kydera),
but it looks like the reviews of the Radioddity version are mostly people who have been given the radio for free to review.
I didn’t get this for free. I bought it with my own money,
so you can be confident my review is completely unbiased.
This is a dual band DMR radio with two separate radios inside
so you can listen to two frequencies at the same time,
or listen on one and transmit on the other.
This allows some interesting features like the ability to act as a cross band or single band repeater,
including converting between DMR and analog.
So you could set this up to listen to a DMR
frequency and transmit that back out on FM or vice versa.
Now, I bought this radio a few weeks ago after seeing the Radioddity version
online and being amazed at the single frequency repeater function it offered.
A single frequency repeater uses the two timeslots of DMR as the repeater input and output.
So this radio can listen on one timeslot and transmit the audio back out
on the other timeslot, acting as a DMR repeater but only using one frequency.
I had really high hopes for this radio.
I assumed that they’d have all the basics covered and I was excited to try out this feature
and some of the other interesting features it offers thanks to having two VFOs or two radios inside.
But once I got this radio, I realised they just don't have the absolute basics working to an acceptable level in my opinion.
The minimum volume on this radio is far too loud.
I tried listening to my local net and ended up having to switch radio to one that had a reasonable minimum volume.
This problem occurs on both DMR and analog.
It’s really difficult to adjust the volume as well, because the volume change lags quite a bit.
The radio’s menu system is honestly the most confusing and difficult to use I’ve ever seen on any digital handheld.
And that’s me, someone who knows DMR well using it.
If someone who was new to DMR bought this radio, I think they’d find it so difficult they’d probably just give up.
The grouping of many of the settings makes no sense. You have to press up to go down.
You can’t see the name of the menu item until you get to it, so you have to try and remember what each icon means.
And then when you get to the end of a line of icons and want to move to the next row,
instead of just moving to the next row it shifts all the icons along one,
which is just so confusing to look at and makes me lose track of where I was in the menu.
It seems they’ve taken the design principles of every other DMR radio’s menu and done the opposite.
They should have just stuck with a simple text based menu like most other radios have.
The radio has the ability to hold 300000 DMR contacts, so you can load in the details
of every amateur that uses DMR and have their name, callsign and location come up on screen.
But it’s pretty useless because it always gets stuck on about the second person to be received
after you turn the radio on, and shows their name and callsign for everyone from then on.
The APRS doesn’t seem to work at all. In the last firmware it would crash the radio if you put in a
message that was too long, but now I can’t get it to transmit at all with a preset message.
The single band repeater function doesn’t work right if the radio is converting between DMR and
analog, because the audio gets a loud pulsing sound added to it whenever it’s transmitting DMR.
The single frequency repeater sounds terrible. It seems to be decoding the digital audio and then passing it into the vocoder again,
instead of just passing the voice data through as every other DMR repeater does.
This is causing the audio to be extremely quiet and sound even more compressed than DMR usually does.
It’s also really unreliable. It often just seems to transmit silence instead of transmitting the audio it received.
And there are more. There are just so many little issues with this radio that really should have been fixed before it was released.
The fact that they haven’t been fixed over two years after it was originally released by Kydera is completely unacceptable to me.
All the bugs, combined with the terrible menu system and ridiculously loud minimum volume on the radio make it basically unusable for me.
My recommendation is that you don’t buy this radio, either from Radioddity or Kydera.
Wait and see if Radioddity fixes the issues with it.
Most of them should be fixable in firmware updates.
If they do fix the issues then please support Radioddity and buy the Radioddity version rather than the Kydera version.
Radioddity’s support is far better. They post the programming software and firmware updates on their website,
whereas Kydera has nothing on their website and didn’t even reply to my emails asking for the firmware.
Right now there’s no guarantee that the issues with this radio will be fixed
especially since the Kydera version has been out for over two years now and still has all these problems.
I’ve known of radios being abandoned by their manufacturers before with major bugs in.
That’s not okay, and that could happen here if people keep buying this radio and not complaining.
Since Radioddity has started selling this radio, they’ve already added talker alias,
which is a DMR feature that sends your name and callsign (or some other message you set)
when you’re transmitting and receives the same information from others.
This lets you see who you’re talking to without having to load the ham contacts database and keep it updated.
They haven’t fixed any of the major bugs yet, but at least they’re doing something, so I do have some hope.
I hope that in a few months time I’ll be able to make another video recommending this radio
and saying it’s so great that radioddity has fixed all the bugs and everything works properly now.
Until then, this radio is unfortunately just going to sit on my shelf unused,
waiting for some firmware updates that make it usable enough that I’d pick it up instead of one of my other DMR radios.