Summary

• Nice solid radio. Plastic is quite shiny, fit and finish is pretty good
• Pros: Cheap, good receive sensitivity, packed with gimmicks and features
• Cons: Some annoying little quirks, access to squelch control is long-winded, 2ch/sec scan speed

Notes and Whinges

• Squelch opening exits the menu. This is the most irritating aspect of this radio: if you're in menu mode and the squelch goes from closed to open, it exits you from the menu. If this is a 'feature', it would be nice if it could be disabled!
• Slow access to squelch. Involves pressing menu, 2, menu, up or down to adjust it, menu, exit [minimum 6 presses] to adjust the squelch. And to think, there are two buttons below the PTT that could easily be repurposed to do squelch up/down!
• Pager intermod on FM broadcast band receiver.
• SMA socket is on the radio not the antenna, which is the wrong way round to my mind, and necessitates using adaptors if you want to use normal SMA antennae. Same as Kensung KG-3118 handheld that I binned because it was horrible.
• Good solid construction with aluminium chassis
• Hold 'MENU' whilst powering on to change between VFO and MR mode. I can find no reference to this in the manual.
• Editing channel names is a confusing and tedious process, and IME doesn't work very well in VFO mode. If you can get hold of the software and a programming cable, make use of it! It has a large alphabet of characters, but if you use anything other than 0-9 A-Z or ? + -, it will put blanks in.
• Whilst scanning in MR mode, the channel number indicator and the channel name get out of sync!
• It would be nice if the A/B lights at the top were different colours or spaced further apart, then you could tell from a distance which channel was breaking the squelch

Things I've noticed whilst in use

• Keeping the monitor button held down whilst using the menu will prevent a squelch-open event from exiting the menu
• When scanning, sometimes the squelch will open very briefly but it won't stop scanning
• The belt clip wasn't very strong and has since broken. Seems like the plastic was too soft for the spring
• Maximum volume not quite good enough for outdoors, IMO
• Can't use bottom row of buttons when it's in the charger
• Pulses of horrible interference when on charge with supplied charger
• Can't use channel 99 to store anything. Odd behaviour abounds with Ch99 - keypad beep comes on and the squelch won't open.
• Holding up to step through channels is actually quicker than using scan mode, and the radio is actually tuning into each frequency in turn, becuase the squelch will open. So the hardware is obviously capable of much faster scan speed than the firmware will let it run at