I have a few Baofeng BF-888s radios and they are great radios for the price but the charger does not exactly fill me with confidence. The drop in charger comes with a single insulated twin core cable which is very thin and a 2 pin plug with a 3 pin adaptor. No fuse and no secondary insulation make it a dangerous mix so I have replaced the cable on all of mine with some proper twin core mains cable and a 3 pin plug with a 3 Amp fuse.
The original, untouched charger…
Back off the charger showing where mains input is soldered…
I have lots of mains cables in the junk box and used a standard “figure of eight” stereo lead…
New cable soldered in with a small cable tie used for strain relief…
Put back together and ready to be plugged in…
It looks much better now and is much safer with the secondary insulation and a proper fused plug.
I bought some 3.7v lithium battery charging pcbs from China and installed those in my BF888 chargers. Phone charger plugs into the micro usb socket. No more mains voltages at the drop in charger.
Works a treat and the pcbs are pennies.
Hi Darren.
That is exactly what I did with mine a few months ago. I keep meaning to update the post with a quick how to!
Matt
when you put the unit to the charger while not plug in outlet the led lights up, it means there is no diode installed on the circuit board, it may discharge the battery.
Yes, that is correct.
I’ve now modified all of my BF888 chargers to use a USB powered Lithium charging circuit. The boards are available from Ebay and are much better that the original charger.
I didn’t bother with a post on my site because it is well detailed here…
https://www.instructables.com/id/Baofeng-USB-mod/