Baofeng BL-5 Battery: Initial Capacity

The first two charges for those Baofeng BL-5 batteries show that the actual capacity isn’t quite up to the 1800 mA·h spec:

The (meager) instructions say that the batteries will reach “full capacity” after three charges. Unless there’s a miracle waiting in the wings for that third charge, I very much doubt that they’ll get any better than the 1400 to 1500 mA·h you see in that graph. Note that the two batteries have quite different capacities and that the capacity for Pack B decreased on the second charge (purple vs. green trace).

Compare that with the Wouxun batteries (plotted with Gnuplot, rather than a screen grab):

Those are all at 250 mA, which is certainly less than the peak current and probably more than the average current. It’s close enough for now, anyway, and shows that the Wouxun batteries actually live up to their spec.

Huh. Who’d’a thunk it?

It looks like the blinky lights should go into power-save mode under 7 V, because there just isn’t that much capacity left when the cells start rolling over the edge of the cliff.