I bought a pair of third-party 3800 mA·h batteries for the Baofeng UV-5RE Plus (whatever that means) radios on our bikes. Oddly, the packs carry the same “Model BL-5” identification as 1800 mA·h batteries shipped with the radio:
The obviously mislabeled “Baofeng” battery eliminator also sported a 3800 mA·h label:
I conjured a “test fixture” from a clamp, copper sheet, and copper tape snippets:
Which produced interesting results:
The 250 mA load = 15 hour rate seemed reasonable to simulate radios spending most of their time in power-save mode, but the packs still delivered only 2.8 A·h.
The packs also claim an unnaturally precise 28.12 W·h, but they’re still underperformers at 20 W·h:
Anyhow, I can run the radios for a week without (worrying about) running out of juice during a ride.
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