I went with members of the University of Michigan Amateur Radio Club and the ARROW club to Findlay, Ohio for the total eclipse. The eclipse itself was fantastic - the sudden darkness, the eerie lack of shadows, the bright horizon, and the fabulous corona around the disk of the moon. Well worth it.
While I was there I got a chance to check in to the "Seneca County Total Eclipse Net" which ran on the Seneca County, Ohio (Bascom, Ohio) 145.15- repeater. I know this repeater because when band conditions on two meters are just right, there will be interference between it and the N8DUY 145.15- repeater that shares a frequency but has a different PL tone.
The radio I brought with me was a Quansheng UV-K5, an HT which I got in February 2024 for less than $30. I loaded it with the ezgumer firmware from https://github.com/egzumer/uv-k5-firmware-custom and had very good results operating on frequencies that I didn't have preprogrammed into the radio.
The Quansheng will take Baofeng accessories, so I swapped out the stock antenna with the Nagoya NA-771 that I got a few years back. That helped quite a bit as the stock antenna is not very good.
The ezgumer firmware includes a spectrum montior which pulls in about 2 MHz of bandwidth at a time. As a built-in scanner of sorts it allowed me to find out where the traffic was and to tune into it pretty much right away. For regular channels it has an S meter which is sensitive enough to let you fine tune position.
Front panel programming for the Quansheng is much easier than on any Baofeng I have used. With this firmware loaded the front panel buttons can be long-pressed to do the function that's labeled on the button. There is a big button for a menu to get you to per-channel options that worked as well as I needed it to be.
My best transmit results were to use the rooftop of the car as an extra ground plane, that brought the receive signal up from S2 to S4 and let me check in to Bascom from Findlay (about 20 miles of flat terrain).
All in all a trip well worth it.
