I bought this power & SWR meter and dummy load from Amazon:

SURECOM SW-33 Mark II VHF/UHF 100W Power & SWR Meter
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075H8FDDR

Hestish 50 Ohm Dummy Load RF Coaxial Termination
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077PC9ZLD

Total spent at the time (including sales tax) was approx. $60 USD.  That's just about the price of a new BF-F8HP from BaoFeng Tech.  But at that point I was already over a dozen HTs into the hobby/obsession, so what the heck...

My specific use case for these items was to fine tune output power on my BTECH DMR-6X2 after putting it in test mode.  "Low" power at the ~1W factory setting is way too high for my needs, and I ended up cutting that back to 500 mW (still far higher than I need to hit a hotspot in the same room).

IMHO, this power meter worked fine for that task, but I wouldn't trust it to fine tune any increase in power levels.  I have no way to know how well it's calibrated, other than to compare it's readings to what I expected to see on the 1/2.5/5/7W settings of my DMR-6X2.  And the differences in the lower power readings between the VHF vs. UHF bands leads me to believe that the factory calibration on this radio is not that accurate.

I was already licensed by the time I did this, but I'm curious as to the opinion of the list here:

Does pressing PTT with a dummy load in place of an antenna still constitute "transmitting" per the letter of the FCC regs?


On 6/3/2020 1:57 PM, Stefan Halvorsen via chirp_users wrote:

I ordered the kid from Amazon that included the TIDRADIO "version" of what I believe is the BF-F8HP because it's 8 watt high, 4watt medium, and 1 watt low.
I can confirm that the cable in the kits labeled it had FTDI chip worked with chirp, and my Linux machine running Linux mint 19.3. 
I did have to run chmod command before chirp had access to the USB0. Without the command it says access denied in chirp when I try to clone from radio.
I followed protocol of how to plug in and in what order and it was able to download from radio with no issue. Max volume on radio.
Also, I was able to select BF-F8HP as the device and was able to set power levels for each freq in low/Med/high. 
I was able to successfully download program to radio. 
I have no way to measure transmit power to know if it's actually 8 watt or actually has 3 power levels, since I haven't gotten my license yet and am just listening while I study. I also have no device to measure.
I have heard that some shady companies are marketing these radios as 3 power levels and 8 watts on high and some hacking firmware to show 3 levels but only transmitting 4 watt on medium and high. But it does seem legit.
TIDRADIO told me this was their OEM version of the BF-F8HP. 
BF-F8HP seems to be the BTech oem version.

But I wanted to confirm that, at least with my Linux distro Linux mint 19.3 and chmod command, I was able to download to chirp and select the BF-F8HP as the model to set 3 power levels on frequencies.

I will try on my windows machine but the way I see it, if it works on my Linux machine then it'll easily work on windows.