They don't come with the ability to transmit outside the ham bands from Yaesu or Icom. Somebody has modified them. It's known as the MARS or CAP mod.

The transceiver ICs they usually use are designed for commercial radios and that is the frequency range that they typically cover. The ability to monitor other services is a useful feature.

The big version would be a lot of fun. That's crazy that you can get an EIRP of 90 dBm from something that small. It could be used as a portable EME station.

It looks good. I was lazy and used one of those brush wall plates for mine.

For the grounding, you can get a small piece of copper flat bar. It's not that expensive and will give a good, solid ground connection to the bulkhead connectors passing through it. You can through bolt a ground lug to the copper bar to connect the ground cable to.

Also, a tip for installing old work boxes. There are 4 small holes in the corner. Hold the front of the box against the wall and poke a small nail through the holes, then use a straight edge to draw lines between them. That will perfectly mark the hole you need to cut out.

I've still got mine somewhere. It's a newer one that has a solderless breadboard in it.

For memory banks, I have one for my favorite repeaters at home and one for each area that I frequently travel to. I also have some banks for scanning like MURS/FRS/GMRS, airband and marine VHF. I have a Kenwood radio, so there are lots of memory banks, but you can't put one channel in multiple banks. That means I have to make some duplicate channels if I want them in more than one bank.

Chirp runs fine on Ubuntu as long as it's not too old. It needs GTK4 now. There are instructions on the Chirp wiki for installing it.

It's a Dahua DVR with analog cameras. I have my firewall set so the DVR can only access the push notification server and my SMTP server.

Mine runs locally on the DVR. I wouldn't trust any cloud service with my video.

My old setup only had normal motion detection. I couldn't enable alerts with that because it would go off all night from the bugs swarming the IR LEDs on the cameras.

Sure, there are good uses.

I use the RADE V1 codec in FreeDV. It is an AI vocoder that packs high quality audio into 1500 Hz of bandwidth. It sounds much better than traditional codecs like AMBE or Codec 2.

Another one I use is AI motion detection for my security cameras. It recognises a vehicle or a person and significantly reduces the number of false alerts.

Hopefully they don't try to take over the band. They are currently only authorized to use 430 MHz for emergency use and only for 24 hours.

That's just the bad user interface design you see on a lot of radios.

If you can save up a little bit more money, you could get a Yaesu FT-60. They are currently on sale for $140 through the end of January. It's an older model, but it performs much better that a cheap Chinese HT.