Radioddity GM-30 GMRS Radio

The biggest issue that bothered me was the screen and brightness. Backlighting: The screen is backlit. The brightness is not adjustable. It's either off or really bright. And while being really bright, it makes it excellent to read even on the brightest day at night. I found it to basically be a destroyer of night vision. Sure, you can adjust the time of the screen backlight, but I would have liked the ability to adjust the brightness itself. Furthermore, the backlight on the keypad times out way too quickly for my preference, like within one second. I would like to see the keypads backlit. At least match the screen backlight settings as far as display timeout. Again, during the day, this isn't really an issue, but at night or in low light conditions, this is. What I experienced was that the screen backlight would destroy my night vision, and by the time it was adjusted, the keypad backlighting had disappeared, making it difficult to see the key values underneath the bright screen.   It doesn't come with a programming cable.  a cable isn't necessary to program the radio, but it does make the task a lot quicker and easier. Not to mention If you use the programming software, you can upload the same settings to multiple radios rather than manually. You have no choice but to use a programming cable to keep your firmware up to date. It's only an extra 15 dollars at the moment, so it's not the end of the world, but it would have been nice to have had it included in the box. According to radioity, it's not water resistant, according to radioity. The radio is not water resistant, let alone waterproof. So if you plan on using this outdoors in harsher environments or inclement weather, you'll need to take care to keep this radio out of the elements. To be honest, whether using the built-in mic or the included headset, the earpiece isn't very comfortable.   No matter how I adjusted the settings or the mic distance from my mouth, I found the hands-free feature to be too sensitive or not sensitive enough. Fortunately, I never really use the hands-free features of any radio, so this is no big deal for me, but if Vox is something that you plan to use a lot, I can only hope your experience is better than mine.    They don't come with a spare belt clip. You see, the bell clip on the GM30 screws into the back of the battery. So if you want to swap batteries and only have one belt clip, you'll need to swap over the belt clip as well. I also wish there was an option for a charging dock to be able to just set it up and use the radio as a base station while charging.    But since the charger plugs into the bottom of the battery, it can't stand up by itself while it's plugged in. Lastly, and I realize I'm nitpicking at this point, the memory or channel mode and the VFO or frequency mode apply to both VFOs at the same time. In other words, it doesn't seem like I can have VFOA in memory mode and VFOB in frequency mode.     Overall, this is a great GMRS radio and really seems to be tuned well given the price point.