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This ought to be fun... How about a citation indicating that there *is* liability? [Getting my bag of chips]

Unfortunately you can't conduct business activities on the Ham 2M band. About range comparisons between MURS and FRS radios in the open I don't expect a huge difference between them. However if one is using external antennas that would be different, but FRS that isn't allowed to use external antennas so the tests would be between MURS and GMRS radios. From a very basic technical view point the typical antenna on a GMRS HT is nearly a quarter wave long, about 6 inches, and the body of the radio is large enough to make a fair ground plane. Compared to a VHF radio around 150 MHZ where a quarter wave antenna is 18 inches long so radio body is a poor ground plane. It's often mentioned the typical 6 to 8 inch rubber duck VHF antennas have a negative 5 to 6 db gain relative to a quarter wave ground plane antenna. Without going through the math using quarter wave ground plane antennas for VHF and UHF the VHF radio has approximately a 9.5 db (a factor or 9) advantage due to "path loss" over a UHF radio. So for a 2 watt MURS radio the range would be equivalent to an 18 watt UHF radio with line-of-sight operation. Now using just the rubber duck antennas the over all gain difference is reduced to around 3 db more or less. In practice you might not even notice it. IMHO this is sort of the way I see it.

Well that is a good opinion, but I am still waiting for @BoxCar to give us a citation for his unequivocal claim that there is no liability.

I should add that my two spare batteries were still fully charged after sitting the same length of time- but not on a radio. Both of my radios were stone dead. Having worked in this stuff, some designers just don't worry about such things. They put the processor in sleep mode and figure that's good enough. They don't want to bother with circuits that wait for the switcher to reach voltage and reboot the processor whenever the power is turned on. It certainly can be done but they just don't bother. They probably imagined that people would store the radios in the charger base when not in use. But not everyone does. At my last job it took about 2 full days of arguing to get a lazy project engineer to change the design so the batteries were not drained while being stored. And they were not removable batteries!!! And it was a product that is often stored for long periods between use. The fix cost like 20 cents. But this is how some engineers think. I have inserted paper tabs in my 805G radios so I can leave the packs attached but not connected. This way I don't have to carry the batts separately. When I want to use the radio I'll just release the pack and remove the paper. Seems to work well. Vince

Nevermind. After hours of looking I found it. I also downloaded the most current versions of the programming software for most of Vertex's HT and mobile radios. I downloaded the export version which allows programming of wideband for GMRS. If anyone needs one let me know.

Little follow up to my install above. Got the SWR meter in and tested Ch05 1.01 Ch16 1.06 Ch22 1.04 Can not complain at all abought that! Just a simple factory tuned midland ant.