Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

These radios work perfectly for many different uses. There seems to be a lot of confusion on what you can and can’t do with these radios so hopefully this can help someone out. You CAN use these radios as walkie-talkies provided you do a little research and only program FRS, GMRS and MURS channels, these channels are a block of frequencies shared by all consumer radios be it this one, a “GMRS” radio or the avengers one you bought for your kids CH 16 for example is always 462.575 MHz. Transmitting on these channels only will not cause you any problems because no one on earth knows that you are doing it with what is technically a HAM radio and not the overpriced dewalt job site 2way radio, so use them that way all you want, we use them jetsking all the time but like the fact we are able to tune VHF 16 in the event of an emergency. So where does the “legal” issue come in? The UV5-R is technically a HAM radio which requires a license to TRANSMIT on and HAM isn’t allowed to transmit on GMRS and those with a GMRS license can’t transmit on HAM that’s it. As well the only difference between your “GMRS” radio that you need a license for and the one you bought off the shelf at Walmart is the license one has slightly higher power and a removable antenna but still operates on the same frequencies.The thing you need to be careful of with this radio is unlike a GMRS radio which will only have 22 pre programmed channels you can dial up any channel you want, so if you and your friends pick say 145.500 on your radios you’ve now left the block of approved frequencies and are on a HAM radio channel and will instantly anger a bunch of people and run a true foul of the FCC in a way that they may do something about. If you want a radio you can use in the wood with your friends as a walkie-talkie with the ability to tune emergency frequencies and LISTEN to HAM things you can't go wrong with this radio, Just do your research and keep it on the right channels please, there is no need to spoil HAM operators fun. Hope this helps someone trying to figure out what people mean when they say these radios are “illegal” and what your responsibilities as a user are.