I could not resist and ended up buying the PMR446 pair at LIDL to investigate their insides

[ftg@mastodon.radio]

I could not resist and ended up buying the PMR446 pair at LIDL to investigate their insides.
The short story is that they have AT1846S as the radio chip, so the usual chip from a Baofeng UV-5R and some no-name blank MCU driving it.
But it does have 9 channels.
And there really is 9 separate channels, not just ch8 with CTCSS or something as the last one.
But I don't like those random spurs it sometimes has at TX/RX transitions.
It looks like PLL locking with the PA on.

[ftg@mastodon.radio]

@synx508
Yep, maybe!
And baofengs don't do this, so it's their fuckup and not the 1846 transceivers fault.
BTW it looks like this on the inside.
AF PA is HX8002H, RF PA is some "H3" marked SOT-89, suspected LDMOS.
And the RX path has a real SAW filter, pointing towards some attempt to make the RX robust towards out of band stuff.
So potentially, this thing will outperform Quansheng UV-K5 and Baofeng UV-5R when it comes to strong out of band signals.

[azonenberg@ioc.exchange]

@synx508 @ftg Wild guess: they turn off the enable for the PA power rail then start reprogramming the synthesizer, but the PA takes time to drain filter caps?