with the Baofeng radios squelch 0-9 is a programmable setting if you haven't set them right your squelch is pretty much useless.. Pretty sure I’ve cranked them all to 9 by now.
On most radios the lower the number the farther you can hear, and the higher number reduces that crackly noise. Some radios only come from the factory with very narrow range for squelch, and i bet I know the reason for that. With chirp you can go in and adjust those factory numbers...greatly. But most guys just go into the menu and hit factory reset. Hey the radio just started speaking chinese, i bet i have redone a 1000 of those chinese speaking radios.I was talking about squelch in general. Always seen the button but never knew what it did? Thanks