Inside the Baofeng BF-888S battery charger

The two Baofeng handhelds ive bought have come, as expected, with chargers for their 5v Li-ion batteries. The first thing I noticed about which, is the thinness of the AC power cable!

The next thing I noticed was the weight - or lack of! Clearly, there was no isolating transformer in these! So, I decided to open one up and take a skeg -

Opening these was really easy, but of course I know how. A single screw to be removed, followed by careful use of a blunt knife blade to tease the case clips apart. This revealed inside what looks to be a reasonably well made switch mode charger circuit.

What it clearly is not is any kind of 'intelligent' charger! Probably adequate for this purpose, but I would still be wary of the thin mains cable. It would be sensible to feed these via a 1:1 isolation transformer. Or, better yet, bypass the AC switch mode section and give it a decent DC feed from a good regulated PSU.

What would be easy though, and probably quite neat, due to the light and thin construction of the case, would be to mount several charger units on a board, say six or eight or whatever is needed, add a suitable DC PSU, a safety timer, and maybe a selector for the number of 'pods' active, and you'd have a quick and simple multi-charger for a fleet of these radios!

If I get time tomorrow, i'll run one of the radios over the Marconi 2955, and post a report on the performance of these cheap little radios.