Abbree AR-730 6-Band Radio Review

It fits in my large hands fairly well, with my index finger right on the PTT button. The back is well-rounded, and the clip has angled sides, so there is nothing to poke in my palm or make it uncomfortable. The hard plastic of the PTT button and rubber like material on the speaker/microphone cover are pretty slick, however, so you have to watch your grip.

Buttons on the keypad of the Abbree AR-730 are pretty firm and provide good tactile and audible feedback. They are quite close together, but there seems to be enough room that hitting multiple keys is unlikely. The firmness also helps in this regard.

The knob on top controlling the power and volume has a nice detent for the power and is fairly smooth, although the resistance is inconsistent, resulting in an odd feel. It also seems to have the least resistance at the end of its movement, maybe the last 15-20%.

In the middle of the front of the Abbree AR-730 is the color screen. It appears to be a 1.4″ diagonal screen, which is pretty small for this radio. It does seem reasonably sharp however there is a lot of wasted space on the display, for example, the frequency is displayed left to right as “446.00000 VFO”. I am not sure why there are two extra zeros on the end, or why it was necessary to put VFO there instead of maybe above the frequency. This would allow the frequency display to be larger to make the most out of the screen they have.

Speaking of the screen, it is set to turn off after 5 seconds and there appears to be no way on the radio to extend that. There is, however, a way to do it in CHIRP. I hate having to do that, especially since there is no real way to change that in the field if you wanted to.

The battery of the Abbree AR-705 is a nondescript 7.4v Li-ion battery which tests out at, 1030mAh and has a model number of EP3701A. I tried searching for rating data on the other manufacturers specifications, but it seems that whoever the OEM of the radio is, may not provide that information to their customers.

On the back of the battery is where the belt clip slides in and locks. It uses an all plastic locking tab, which I am sure will break pretty quick if you take the clip on and off a couple of times. The clip itself look sturdier than it is, as looking at the back you can see where the plastic has been removed to cut costs. Probably the worst thing here is the way the battery attaches to the radio, using two small, spring-loaded latches, one at the top left and one at the top right. These are tiny and so require using your fingernails to release. If you have no nails or your nails are brittle like mine, you have problems as these clips require some serious force to move.

I mentioned earlier that you could use CHIRP to program the Abbree AR-730, and that is correct, you can fully program the radio using any old standard Baofeng programming cable. I am sure any of the variants discussed earlier would work as well. Even so, it still disappoints me that you have to break out a computer and programming cable just to change simple things like the backlight timer.

Funny enough, you could buy programming software from RT Systems with a cable for $49.00 plus shipping, for a radio that costs $29.99 from AliExpress, lol.

Performance:

Power output comes in at 6 watts on 2m and 5.1 watts on 70cm. Yeah, I had to do the test twice just to make sure I did that right because I can’t believe this radio actually puts out over 5 watts. Amazing.

The antenna on the Abbree AR-730 is a piece of hot garbage at any frequency, although it doesn’t stink quite as bad on 70cm as it does on 2m. It is fairly flat on all the rest, making it a pretty poor receiver.

Looking at the spectrum analysis, it does not do as bad as I expected, with a reasonable output that is not terribly inconsistent and looks pretty much on frequency. It isn’t great, but it is certainly better than expected and way, way better than the AR-518 (that really isn’t saying much, I could smash two rocks together and get a better signal than the AR-518).

Audio output is loud, primarily due to an obviously overdriven microphone, which I believe is what also raised the noise floor and added some sibilance. It is passable though as long as you don’t raise your voice.

Images:

Radio Specifics:

Test Images:

• 136-174MHz (Receive & Transmit)
• 220-260MHz (Receive & Transmit)
• 350-390MHz (Receive & Transmit)
• 400-520MHz (Receive & Transmit)
• 65-108MHz (FM RX)
• 108-136MHz (AM RX)- Air Band
• Wireless copy function
• Frequency/CTCSS detection
• 256 memory channels
• VOX function
• Emergency function
• Scan function
• PC programming
• SOS

The radio does have USB-C charging with a port in the bottom of the battery along with a charge indicator LED. I am impressed that the Abbree AR-730, as cheap as it is, comes with a drop-in desktop charger as well as an AC adapter with a USB cable, all in the same box. That is extremely unusual for a budget radio.

Conclusions

So would I recommend this Abbree AR-730? No. Although the radio did far better than I expected, considering the dismal crash and burn of their AR-518, it still has a very low value for dollar in my opinion. For the same price you could get a Tidradio TH-H3, which is in every way a far superior radio and comes with a clone of a Nagoya 771 antenna and a 2500mAh battery. The only advantage this radio has, is it comes in colors.

Here are some reviews of the Abbree AR-730!