Pick your radio
Each profile is the handful of settings that matter for a first contact, in the order you set them. Missing yours? Profiles are plain text files anyone can add: content/radios.
Photos: Baofeng UV-5R family: P e z i, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Explorer QRZ-1: Explorer product photo · TIDRADIO TD-H3: TIDRADIO product photo · Yaesu FT-65 / FT-4X: Yaesu product photo · Yaesu FT5DR: Yaesu, from the FT5DR operating manual.
No radio yet? Listen on somebody else’s
Hundreds of receivers around the world are open to the public on the web. You pick a frequency in the browser and hear what their antenna hears — no licence needed to listen, nothing to install, nothing to buy. It is the cheapest way to find out what the bands actually sound like before you own anything.
The list is by country, city and band. Try 40 m in the evening for voices a few hundred miles off, or 20 m in the afternoon for the other side of an ocean. Some owners ask you not to retune theirs while they are using it; the listing says which.