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Rick, Don't expect to many people to admit to breaking the law on an internet forum. Here is my thoughts, the Baofeng and its many knock offs are junk. The radios sound like crap, cause adjacent channel interference and preform poorly in the real world. Now I know all the Baofeng fans will come in out in full force to defend this junk and I will never know why. Even the beloved Btec GMRSV1 fails to maintain its frequency stability if you TX long enough to exceed the 5% duty cycle. You get what you pay for with radio gear, if you buy a 20 dollar radio its going to work like a 20 dollar radio. I have several users on my repeaters that use them and to be honest I plan to start revoking permission because of the poor audio and signal quality. Corey

Corey, yur just mean. Some of the Chinese junk is good junk, and some of it is bad junk. Hmmm, I have some of the good junk and some of the bad (American labeled , you know who I mean) junk. Yup, yur just mean. Thank you for being honest and politically incorrect. !!, Keith T

I owned 2 Baofeng ham radios for a combined total of 2 weeks. I wouldn't give one to someone I don't like, because its too cruel. Do yourself a favor and forget they exist. Just my opinion.

Here in Nebraska, CB never went out of fashion with the local short-haul trucking community. All of the local guys still use channel 19, and we now have an expanding population of immigrant truck drivers in the area using channel 22 in Spanish. I live 5 blocks away from a grain elevator, and 4 miles from a feed distribution site, so I hear a lot of CB traffic every hour. The elevator uses either channel 19, or sometimes channel 12 to instruct drivers how to back around to the loading/unloading areas etc. I live in the middle of nowhere, so the only thing I ever hear on GMRS is my own family, and some occasional ducting from a grandfathered business-licensed system on .625 that is used by a concrete company east of me about 70 miles. (They have a phone patch. Not sure that's legal even on a grandfathered system.) On FRS channel 1, I quite often hear the little girls across the street playing with their walkie talkies, but that's about it.

Welcome from Florida. These folks here have helped me immensely and I am learning everyday from them. Unfortunately for them I have a tone more questions LOL. Enjoy

Glad to hear you are having luck with the Stryker. Environmental conditions will play heavily into how well your radio can receive a weak signal. If you have a received signal that is only 1 S unit, but you have 3 S units of stray noise around you, you will never hear the 1 S unit signal. If you drive out of the high noise area, even if you get further away, the reduction is RF noise will allow you to have a conversation with that station, even at 1 S unit, and be able to have a 100% copy. As far as placement goes, as long as they are spaced in a way that one doesn't fall within a physical harmonic, you should be fine. It's damn near impossible to do on purpose. It's very unlikely that you will do it by mistake. I have noticed that when I key my GMRS while in high power, the noise level on my HF gear goes up. Nothing unreasonable, but when the squelch is open, I can notice it. That's all. When the squelch is closed, there is no impact. I have a 120 watt RMS amp on my 10m radio. Whenever I use the amp, I turn the GMRS gear off. Though, I have never actually experienced any of my HF gear causing issues with my VHF or UHF gear. That sounds like an awesome setup!