They don’t come with the ability to transmit outside the ham bands from Yaesu or Icom. Somebody has modified them. It’s known as the MARS or CAP mod.

The transceiver ICs they usually use are designed for commercial radios and that is the frequency range that they typically cover. The ability to monitor other services is a useful feature.

It looks good. I was lazy and used one of those brush wall plates for mine.

For the grounding, you can get a small piece of copper flat bar. It’s not that expensive and will give a good, solid ground connection to the bulkhead connectors passing through it. You can through bolt a ground lug to the copper bar to connect the ground cable to.

Also, a tip for installing old work boxes. There are 4 small holes in the corner. Hold the front of the box against the wall and poke a small nail through the holes, then use a straight edge to draw lines between them. That will perfectly mark the hole you need to cut out.

I’ve still got mine somewhere. It’s a newer one that has a solderless breadboard in it.

For memory banks, I have one for my favorite repeaters at home and one for each area that I frequently travel to. I also have some banks for scanning like MURS/FRS/GMRS, airband and marine VHF. I have a Kenwood radio, so there are lots of memory banks, but you can’t put one channel in multiple banks. That means I have to make some duplicate channels if I want them in more than one bank.

Chirp runs fine on Ubuntu as long as it’s not too old. It needs GTK4 now. There are instructions on the Chirp wiki for installing it.

Hopefully they don’t try to take over the band. They are currently only authorized to use 430 MHz for emergency use and only for 24 hours.

That’s just the bad user interface design you see on a lot of radios.

That’s a nice radio. It has memory banks, which are essential for managing the 1000 channels it holds. For some reason, Yaesu stopped putting memory banks in their newer radios. The US version is tri band, which is nice if you have any 1.25m repeaters nearby. The batteries are a bit expensive though.