I recently acquired my Technician amateur radio license, and like many folks my first radio purchase was a Baofeng UV-5R. Due to its low cost, this is a very popular radio, and there is excellent open source software available for programming it in the form of the CHIRP project. After futzing around with the UV-5R for a while, I wanted to get something a little nicer for use at home, so I purchased a Kenwood TM-V71A.