Lol.
Good use for Bafueng radios

Didn't like seeing him use the vintage Eico 'scope for a bench rest! Those were good scopes for the money.

Damn, that's just wrong. Both the Elco bench rest as well as the waste of perfectly good radios.

Is it bad I've been wanting to perform some similar testing, but with explosives and multiple radio brands (since I have some PS grade portables laying around).

That was pretty dumb, for what they are, they're fantastic radios. If your going to slam them with how bad they do on gmrs/frs/murs at least give some data to support it. Yeah the stock antenna isnt the best of the best, but it's certainly functional. Works OK on 2m and 70cm too. Not that I wouldn't take a nice Yaesu over it, but they work!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZCDBsBuhmg

All it takes is a glance at them with a service monitor/spectrum analyzer to know they are crap. The spurious emissions from them are enough to get them banned. You run the risk of causing harmful interference and even more so when used outside of the ham bands. They were not designed for that. I would venture to guess the part 90 "compliant" radios are just as bad. Plenty of testing has been done that shows the issues.

To be honest, I own a couple of them and they work OK for me on the local repeaters.
When I first got them and was trying to program them, I wanted to use them for target practice until I figured it out.

I could never understand why some people enjoy destroying things that can be given to those who can't afford it. I don't care if it's cheap radios, smartphones, cars etc. Some people just have an easy life and they have never been hungry nor poor.

Both of the radios under "range test" are failed radios.   Then again, these radios tend to do that at a pretty alarming rate that nobody on this forum would ever accept in a firearm.  :-)

But yet are "acceptable" for SHTF comms. Also the same guys who will spend a million dollars on kit but won't spend a few hundred bucks on a radio that will last in said situation.

I often wonder how many of these reports are just people repeating what they heard other people saying.

https://hamgear.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/baofeng-uv-5r-spectrum-analysis-revisited/

This seems to indicate that Baofengs are GTG.

It actually varies by unit. They quality control is not consistent across the runs. I've actually got one that puts out nearly 2 dBm on a spur…which is right on top of one of the control channels of the local PS safety system when transmitting on a commonly used UHF frequency. I've got another that is just fine though.

Get a Radio Shack HTX-202 or HTX-404 if you want a superior receiver and transmitter. I'm yet to find a better performing HT, commercial or amateur.

Exactly... This is unacceptable. We, as hams, are expected to be technical people and take pride in our radio operation should shun radios that are 50/50 on out of spec and demand that they resolve that issue.

Ok, so let's look at this scientifically.

Are they both the same model number, firmware version, and production run?

There are something like 15 or more different variants of the UV-5R, for example. They all use pretty much identical hardware inside the case. Here is a list (though it is not comprehensive, I see a couple of models missing right off the bat). There are even some manufactured for other labels.

UV-5R variants

Within these variants, there are presumably some minor hardware differences besides the cosmetic case differences (things like the LCD screen, for example, some are "negative" displays). There are many firmware differences, etc. 

The point I am making is that with all of the different Baofeng radios available, it is hard to say that the whole brand is "bad" based on anecdotal evidence like this. If we could identify the offending model/firmware/production runs we could make a more accurate statement than "Some work fine, some don't, so avoid them all". I'd much rather see something like "17% of the BF-F9HP models emit spurious signals based on our testing of XXX number of units in these controlled, laboratory conditions." That's the kind of statement that has value to a budget-minded amateur shopping for radios.

It's like condemning an entire car brand because some examples of one model year had problems.

Good shoot.

I'm not condemning the brand for a single year model. In other posts I have clearly noted that quality control on initial runs was pretty decent with a 70-85% pass rate (which was back in 2012/2013). However, as time progressed that pass rate got lower and lower (the annual test results from the ARRL also show a similar story though the numbers vary every year). 2016/2017 production's quality control is on average 30% pass from the data we've seen thus far.

I didn't know the ARRL was conducting tests on Baofeng radios. Off to google it...

They freely test radios for compliance at Dayton every year. There was a write up in the November 2015 QST about it.