Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a misleading and poorly engineered product. Allow me to explain. Preface. If you are looking for the legal way to communicate with more or less decent range you have very few options. 1. FRS does not require a license but is limited to 500mA (as of today; FCC is implementing changes to allow up to 2W of power on all current FRS channels, including those shared with GMRS). 2. MURS - it's VHF, also unlicensed, with 2W power limit. There are very few MURS certified radios on the market and VHF may present other issues with range. 3. GMRS. You need to get a license from FCC for the modest fee and then you can transmit up to 50 watts on simplex and repeater GMRS channels. You also need GMRS type-approved radio to use these channels legally. So it seems GMRS is the obvious way to go. Here where the problem begins. There are very few high power (>4W) handheld GMRS approved handheld radios on the market (and none that support repeater frequencies). There were a few high quality commercial Part 90 radios that were also certified for 95a (GMRS) but those are discontinued long time ago. The product in question is one of the few ones that produces honest 5 watts - confirmed on FCC web site by looking up FCC ID and relevant lab measurement reports. Sounds great on paper. So after much research and digging through FCC filings and test data I bough it. My experience. 1. Setup of the privacy codes on the first 22 channels is simple enough. What are the rest of the advertised 50 channels there is no description, but you can find discussion online: Apparently these are the same frequencies (have to be - there are only so many GMRS/FRS frequencies allocated) with pre-set privacy codes. No word about what codes and what frequencies in the user manual. It's a gimmick feature to show "more channels" than the competitors and likely those will work with other Midland radios out of the box. I don't like such marketing stunts - but whatever. Not a big deal. 2. Receiver is very noisy. Much noisier than my other commercial handheld's one. This will limit useful range by raising noise floor. Not good. 3. Radio seems to indeed transmit 5 watts with fairly decent range (comparable with that of my other real part 90 5W transceiver). But only when using included battery pack. This is crucial "but" never mentioned anywhere. The battery pack is 5 NiMH AAA rechargeables sealed together. (Note - 5, not 4). Unfortunately the capacity of the pack is 700mAh and according to my measurements the radio consumes average of 42 mA in standby with display off. This makes it only last for 16 hours if you don't transmit (it lasted only 8 hours in my test). Not much at all. What makes it worse - charge time is 12 hours (charging current was well under 150mA). And no, you cannot charge (spare) battery pack while using the other one - it must be charged while in the radio. What's even worse - they include automotive charger in the box - implying that you can quickly recharge the units while driving. Who is driving for 12 hour straight!? This is absolutely useless and misleading feature. So in the current form the radio is unusable for a long backpacking trips - unless you buy charge and bring extra battery packs - 2 per radio per day. 4. But wait you say - you can power the radio with AA batteries!. Yep. Sort of. You can put 4 (not five) AA batteries. And this would of course provide radio with less voltage. Perhaps they engineered it well to properly work on a range of input voltages? Nope. Using AA batteries (or AA NiMH rechargeables) reduces output power to about 2.0 - 2.5 watts. There is no indication of that happening (except the reduced range, and current consumption - which I measured) - the display still shows "H" for high power. And it is not mentioned anywhere in the documentation (or I overlooked the fine print somewhere). This way you get very log battery life - you can find AA batteries with capacities well over 2000mAh - but now the feature you bough the units for and that is advertised in huge letters - 5W output -- does not apply anymore. You got noisy, weak set of walkie-talkies. So, to summarize: 1. Unusable battery life - you either use battery pack with very short life and get your 5W transmit power or use batteries and get 2W. 2. Noisy receiver - limits range by increasing noise floor. 3. Unacceptably long charging time - 12 hours. Included car adapter is therefore useless and is pure gimmick feature. 4. Bogus channels 28 channels (after official 22 FRS+GMRS ones) with unknown frequencies or programming that cannot be changed. Another gimmick. I'm very unhappy with this product. It feels it was made to sell well rather than to work well. I reached out to Midland with questions but they did not respond to me.