Radioddity GM-30 GMRS Handheld Radio, Long Range Two Way Radio, 1 Pack

ive bought 5 gm30 radios given then to friends to use when were wheelin in a group . esp good for vehicle recovery when using winches or yankim ropes..all have worked great, good range and battery life. also easy to charge. also great for group road trips. and in winter for snow removal crews. all around perfect radio thats simple to use and always works. and at a good price. 5 stars

UPDATE #2(6/8/21): This radio is back on Radioddity's site AND Amazon. The company told me that if a product is out of stock, they remove it from their site. Not the best way to deal with that IMHO. It is back and available, so all is good again! UPDATE: Now I don't know what to think! This radio is no longer referenced in any way on Radioddity's web site ...... almost like it never existed! Amazon says it's gone and they don't know if or when it might be available again, so it seems that this review was a waste of my time because no one is ever going to see it! I did write directly to the company and am awaiting a reply as to what's going on. As my first attempt at getting a GMRF radio that was better than my old, ancient Cobra very basic 0.5W radios, I feel the GM-30 was a super choice! The only real problem I've had is in finding and understanding certain settings. I had most of it figured out using the Radioddity software, but ran into a glitch after the firmware update I was sent after I had an inquiry right after purchasing it. BTW, customer service has been very responsive so far, and pretty quick with their answers. Anyway, the glitch was NOT with the firmware install with their cable. It was with the lack of info on the changes it made! I was looking forward to being able to toggle the channel power setting, but even though I had set all channels of GMRF to "High" in the software, I found out while trying to use the GM-30 at a car rally (of sorts), that ALL my channels were set to "Low" power according to the screen readout! PLUS, I had forgotten the toggle key and since this was a "new" feature, there was NO mention of it in the manual! Only when I got back was I able to look in the firmware notes that the toggle was a quick press on the "Lock" key! When I had "SET" all channels to "High" in the software and then uploaded those settings back into the GM-30, it didn't stick at high power. I was therefore a bit disappointed that there I was, trying to communicate in the Great Smokie Mountains and stuck on "Low" power for lack of documentation! The toggle is now written on the front of the manual! I feel that setting the power in software should have stuck when those settings were uploaded back into the radio. Also, when you tune in another channel, you have to set the power level manually EACH time you change a channel! A real pain because the radio does not "remember" you last settings for any channel! Maybe that could be upgraded on the next firmware update?? I even looked to see if an "updated" manual was available so others would not miss that critical change but have not seen one so far! Very bottom line, EVEN in low power, the GM-30 performed fantastically to the point I wasn't aware I was in "Low" power at first. It was reported that voice was clear in transmitting and my reception was great, even with the included ear piece. My new GM-30 seemed to out perform and sound better that several other's Baofeng radios and they were surprised! Great job, Raddioddity! Please make the firmware changes in a maybe NEW manual version we can download and make those power levels "stick" in the software!

This is a good walkie talkie or light duty repeater-capable GMRS radio. You have access to basic walkie talkie (simplex) channels 1-22 for talking radio to radio. For repeaters, there are 8 repeater channels 23-30 plus 24 "DIY" channels. Those channels are factory preset for repeater use with the 5mhz offset, all you need to do is pick a channel that matches the frequency of the repeater, and set the RX and TX tones. No adding and saving repeater channels. While that's good for the beginner, it limits the radio functionality. It's basically 4 banks of the 8 repeater frequencies, and the channel frequencies are hard set and can't be changed other than the PL tone. If you are in an area where multiple repeaters use one frequency, that may be an issue if say, all your .675 repeater channels are already used. The repeater and DIY channels are hard set with the +5mhz offset, so they can't be used for simplex talking. Channels above those are receive-only and can be programmed in VFO (scanner) mode. Ham, MURS, and several other bands of frequencies can be saved into receive-only channels. Get two for simple radio-to-radio talking (you can talk to people on the same channels as the very common consumer walkie talkies called FRS) or get one to learn the basics of GMRS and repeater setup. Learn how to navigate the menu as it seems most handheld GMRS radios are similar. Quick access to the NOAA weather bands, or program your local WX frequency into a receive channel for quicker access. Get the USB programming cable if you want to program names for your channels - if you have multiple repeater channels programmed in, you’ll definitely want the programming cable to name channels! I live around a few repeaters and seem to hit them with clarity. Battery life seems to be decent. Overall a good little radio for the very reasonable price tag. The FM receiver comes in handy. One other limitation - additional channels for talking can't be programmed. Say you want a channel set up specifically for simplex (non-repeater) group chat, using frequency 462.600 and tone 141.3 and have it be a seperate channel with a custom name - that can't be done on this radio where it can be done on others. You'd need to add the PL tone to a simplex channel. Not a major issue, just know that you can only transmit on 1-22 and whatever repeaters you have. Update - had mine for just shy of a year and it still works great. Only issue is there’s a slight hissing noise that seems to fade in after a few seconds when receiving traffic. Noticeable, but doesn’t really hurt functionality too much. Compared to other models, this is somewhat limited to how many repeaters can be programmed in but overall, a good choice for getting started in GMRS or an easy to use radio. Pro - most settings are factory preprogrammed. If you're new to GMRS and not up to speed on radio setup, programming and adding repeater channels with the offsets, this makes it easy because repeater channels are preset and all you need to do is scroll to the frequency and add the TX and RX tones. Radio is small but still has good range. The USB-C charging is convenient over having a charging base. Battery life is good, and the antenna can be changed out. Factory programming software and Chirp both work well. The FM radio mode has worked in picking up stations out in the boonies where I wouldn't expect it to. Cons -not too many. The lack of flexibility in custom programming. You can only have 4 channels programmed for each repeater frequency (462.550 to 725) and if you travel with the radio, you may need to edit channels to get other repeaters in. The display turns off in like two seconds and it gets to be frustrating. For what it is though, those cons aren't a dealbreaker.

This is my fourth Radioddity and my first GMRS/FRS from them. Having sold my two Midlans (which served me well on disaster deployments when I was a teenager), I was looking forward to receiving this walkie-talkie. There's a lot to like here. Build quality lives up to what I expect from Radioddity. Ergonomically the radio feels good in the hand, and the button and keys feel top-notch. Sound quality is excellent and the built-in FM radio is a favorite around the house with non-radio enthusiasts. Brief TX/RX testing showed capability for both clearly in a highly developed area with different elevation (roughly 70ft. difference) at a half-mile distance (using GMRS). That's pretty decent considering the conditions being just about as bad as plausible. The thing that really makes this radio stand out to me and distinguishes it from most if not all "bubble pack" GMRS/FRS combo radios at the big-box stores is the GMRS repeater capability. This is a clear sign that this is a radio made by people who make more than just consumer products: this is a mass-market friendly yet highly capable device. Other features that I really like are the USB-C charging capability (i.e., no custom charger, and USB-C means fewer cables and battery banks for emergency or outdoors use), removable antenna, and *potential* CHIRP programming capability down the road. The fact that Radioddity is actively working on firmware updates is a promising sign that they're enthused about this release. I'll likely buy a second. It's well worth the price when compared to what you could find at a big-box store in this category.

Has performed better than expected. Was a little strange to setup but is a very good radio.

Gm30 a very popular radio’ It probably has as many videos about it as a number of Wouxuns! It is simple to run with many advanced features. I ordered my two Gm30 radios,a single radio pair in October 2022. I missed my return date with Amazon January 31, 2023. I am totally blind so had to face a number of challenges learning to operate my radio with the limited voice prompts which are available on all Chinese radios. It is better to have the voice prompts than not have them at all. Fortunately the GM30 has a keypad which is very helpful with setting up the radio! I’m unable to read the screen! As time went on, I suspected one of my radios had a problem! It didn’t work as well as my other radio. I had other questions so I began working with Irene with Radioddity customer support. She is very patient! I asked Irene about my problem radio. I sent her my Amazon order at the end of November. I confirmed my address and I received my new Gm30 on Sunday the tenth! She didn’t want the troubled radio! Radioddity seems to believe in the quality of their products! They make it right! I’m impressed! The GM30 is a fine radio and when Radioddity stands behind it, one can’t go wrong! Jim

The reviews state that this is #1. I now know why. This is my daily go-to for local usage. It comes pre-programmed with all the FRS, GMRS, and repeaters, and plenty of room for extras. I simply love this and would recommend this to anyone!

**UPDATE** Radioddity has recently made several improvements. As a result, several of the things listed in this review have been either resolved or are currently being worked on. Anything marked with an asterisk * are things that have been resolved. Here's a quick summary: - New software update v2.06 fixes a lot of the issues with the programming - The have sent the radio to the CHIRP team to try to get it supported - They are heavily considering some of the other suggestions made in this review Huge thumbs up to Radioddity for listening to their consumers and trying to make changes to improve the GM-30 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- To summarize, this is a well-built radio and functions great. There are some growing pains, but Radioddity is working to fix several issues that it has at the time of writing this review. If it weren’t for a few major problems, I would be willing to say that this is the best GMRS radio for its class. However, if these few issues don’t affect you, then this is a GREAT radio for its price. Let’s get into everything. Some disclaimers: This is a GMRS radio and requires an FCC GMRS license to operate. As such, I will ONLY compare this radio to other handheld GMRS radios. Radios like the UV-5R and similar models are amateur radios, not GMRS radios, and require different licensing. This makes a difference because the regulations for amateur radios are much more relaxed compared to GMRS radios, giving amateur radios the capability to have a lot more features. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pros/Stand Out Features of the GM-30 Starting off with aesthetics, this radio looks and feels great. One thing that was particularly surprising were the quality of the buttons on the keypad. The keys are very solid and were a pleasant surprise when I started testing this radio. Before getting into the functionality of the radio, I just wanted to point out. The included manual is great. There are a few grammatical errors, but it is very detailed and has some awesome reference tables in the back. Definitely worth keeping around, and good job Radiooddity. Moving on to the functions of the radio, it has a lot of great features built into it. Compared to similarly prices radios, the stand-out feature in my opinion is the ability to monitor the VHF band. This allows you to listen to amateur radio stations and repeaters, and I have had no problems with hearing my local amateur radio repeater on this radio. The other stand-out feature is its CTCSS and DCS tone scanner. To illustrate how this works, let’s say that you’re trying to get in touch with a friend and you know the channel, but you forgot the privacy tone. You can go into the scanner and it will begin scanning through the list of tones until it picks up a transmission. Note that this only works if the other radio/device is transmitting. Moving on to the scanner. It’s not bad, but it’s definitely pretty slow if you’re trying to scan through a large range of frequencies. In a test, the radio scanned through 2 MHz (002.000) with the standard step size (2.5kHz, or 000.0025) in 2:55.97, which means that the radio is changing frequencies roughly every 220 ms. That’s not bad, but if you’re wanting to scan a ton you should consider a dedicated scanner instead. The next thing is compatibility. This radio, from my limited amount of testing, works with all of my Baofeng-compatible PTT’s and speakers. This is really nice because there are tons of options on the market. The antenna is also removable via a hex/allen key (thank you for this) and has a female SMA port on the radio. More on the antenna later. This radio sounds incredible. The speaker is nice and loud, and the audio is super clear and really high quality, even when monitoring VHF transmissions. I can easily hear the NOAA station in Houston from College Station on this radio. Well done Radioddity. Another interesting feature is the Hopping RX function of the GM-30. This does not actually hop frequencies, instead it secretly assigns a CTCSS/DCS tone but won’t display it in the settings. This is a neat idea, but I definitely can see several flaws with it. First, if the radio is just programmed to secretly use 88.5 as it’s CTCSS tone, then someone else simply needs another GM-30 and can perform a CTCSS scan to find out what the secret PL tone is, breaking the “encryption”. A more intelligent way to approach it would be to have the radio emit sub-audible frequencies to tell the other radio what PL tone to use. However, this again is easily broken by another GM-30. It’s a unique idea and I’m glad that they are trying new things, but as far as practicality I’m not too sold (especially anyone with the frequency can simply monitor the frequency and hear all chatter regardless of PL tones). As a side note, it’s actually a good thing it doesn’t hop frequencies. Since GMRS radios have a very limited list of TX frequencies, you wouldn’t get too far, and it wouldn’t be that secure. Not to mention it would be generally poor radio etiquette since you would more than likely end up transmitting over other stations as you’re hopping around. So as far as creating the idea of it, it’s pretty neat. But to reiterate, I’m not too sure how practical it will be. As a side note, Radioddity is adding the ability to change the text on the boot-up screen as well as allowing you to choose which mode (VFO / channel) that you want the radio to boot into. I’m not sure when it will be available but it is coming soon! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Works in Progress: These are issues that currently exist that either Radioddity has said that they are working on or would be relatively easy to implement. There are some major issues, but it seems like Radioddity is working to address these as quickly as possible, and these issues don’t prevent the radio from functioning. **They have confirmed they are working on this** First, this radio does not support CHIRP yet. This is really annoying, and it would be great if they would add this feature, but I am not sure that CHIRP can block users from setting the radio from transmitting on illegal frequencies. This may be a legal issue so it may not come to CHIRP. ** New version is v2.06** However, Radioddity has released their own programming software. There are some flaws with the program itself, but they are actively working on it. The most recent version, version 2.04, updates a lot of features and they are continuing to work on better customization as well as fixing the bugs that currently exist. The programming of this software can be a little confusing, but basically to upgrade the firmware of the radio you are going to turn on the radio while holding the PTT and the LED buttons. This differs from ordinary programming, where you simply need to connect the radio and turn it on. ** These issues have been resolved** There are a lot of issues with the program itself. First, you cannot access all of the radio channel’s settings from the cluttered main screen. However, if you enter the detailed view in the program almost all of the settings are locked. Another issue is that they have added DIY channels to try to allow us to program in repeaters. I like this concept because it does allow us to transmit on the newly programmed channels, but you cannot change the offsets rendering it useless for repeater operation. The other problem I see is that there are a limited number of these channels. Radioddity is aware of these issues and are actively working on them, so this probably won’t be an issue after the time of writing this review. Small Issues: These are more annoyances than actual problems and are small things that I dislike about the radio but are largely preferences. I’ll keep it short here as they are small things that don’t really affect my opinion on the radio that much. - The cover over the microphone and headphone jacks feels flimsy and the direction it opens causes it to stick out in an odd direction with a connector is connected. - The screen can’t be dimmed. It’s super bright, which is great, but options to dim the screen would be nice (the screen is almost as bright as the flashlight on top). - The stock antenna is actually pretty bad for the radio’s transmission range. The SWR of my antenna ranges from 2.84-3.3 for its transmission range, which is honestly terrible. (for those who may not know about SWR, basically you want it as close to 1 as possible. This mostly affects transmission power; it won’t have a major impact on the reception). However, the antenna is removable so you can easily replace it with something better. - The screw used to fix the antenna is screwed into the threads of the SMA port. No major damage, but it definitely has some burs on the threads. - USB-C is only for charging, can’t be used to program. This won’t be easily fixed as the charging port is on the battery not the radio. Not a big deal at all, but it would have been a HUGE plus if you could program it with USB-C. - Clip is nice quality, but the tolerances around the joint are really low. It feels weak and has a lot of play, but there are a lot of metal parts and I’m confident it won’t easily break. - It doesn’t come with a charging cradle. I love cradles, and the battery pack has the connectors to be able to sit on a cradle, but it didn’t come with one. - I think this pertains to just my radio, but when listening on UHF there is a faint flutter in the background similar to the fluttering heard when you’re listening to a mobile station. However, it’s super quiet and I suspect it is only an issue with the specific GM-30 I received. Deal Breakers: These are the things that drastically impact my opinion of the radio and will likely never be fixed or are unable to be fixed without significant modification. The good news is that I only have 2 major issues with the radio, and they don’t impact the functionality of the radio unless you fall into a specific subgroup. The first major issue is that this radio is not waterproof. This is major, and I would have readily compared this to the BTech GMRS-V1 which costs almost twice as much if it weren’t for this issue. This eliminates this radio’s usage for anyone who is involved in watersports, communications for outdoor activities, and those in the prepping community. Even just adding water resistance would exponentially make this radio more valuable. If one of these is the primary reason for getting the GM-30, I can’t recommend it solely because of this until waterproofing to some degree is added. The second major issue has to do with the clip and the battery. This pertains mostly to prepping or scenarios where you may be storing multiple batteries, but the clip is attached to the battery itself instead of the radio. This is not a major issue to most people, but the two solutions if we solely had the GM-30 and its equipment are to 1) unscrew the clip and put it onto the new battery every battery change or 2) have a clip on every single battery pack you own. To Radioddity, I really hope that when you release the replacement batteries for this radio that you will include a new clip with each battery, otherwise this will become very annoying very quickly. There is a potential work-around for this, which is to use a portable battery and charge it using the USB-C port. But this brings up long-term concerns for the prepping community, because if the battery pack itself goes bad then you just have a nice paperweight. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you’ve read all the way to here, then good on you and I’m impressed you’ve made it this far. Here’s the bottom line with this radio: It’s actually really good. Yes, there are a lot of minor things that annoy me, but the important features have been done very well. This radio outcompetes the other radios around the $35-$40 mark, and its closest competitor is almost double the price at $70. This radio is an incredible radio for the money, just be weary of the few issues that I have labeled as major. As this radio currently stands, it lost a star SOLELY because it lacks any kind of waterproofing. Were it to have waterproofing, I likely would have left it a 5-star review. One last thing. I want to give my kudos to Radioddity. They have been very diligent with emailing me back about questions while I was writing this review and have been very helpful. Thanks so much to the Radioddity team!