You decide-deal or dud?

Looks good to me...

Ben

not bad

I've never owned anything good from Midland

You have to be licensed by the FCC to operate GMRS radio's and that's about $80. Big fines if caught.

I don't know anyone who has gone through the process though..

FACTORY SERVICED  in other words they didn't work right the first time they came out of the factory.

How much effort do you think they put into fixing them if they were going to wholesale them out even at $15, and it was probably closer to $10 or so.

I'm thinking that  10 miles with 3 watts is a lot optimistic.  These have omnidirectional antennas, so the actual power radiated in any direction is a lot less.  And at that frequency range, it's line of sight only, a lot of stuff attenuates (soaks some of the signal up) the signal.   10 miles is line of sight best case conditions.  I'ld really be surprised if you got an effective range of more than a mile.

But for the price, they might not be too bad, for a short range unit, just don't go into thinking you are going to get fantastic comms.

That's a pretty good deal.  Midland is a reasonably decent comm company.

Ditto on the licence requirement...although I'm inclined to see whether I can shift the frequency band down into the 440 mhz amateur range....

Jim

I worked for PEMSTAR and we did factory refurb work.
Trust me you wouldn't want anything factory refurbed when you saw what we did to it.