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The effective range was about 2 miles in this condition, which was good enough for me. There's a dock for easy recharging.
But then most people probably don't care about that :-) I kept setting the mode on, then later when I'd try to use it nothing would happen and I'd realize the iVox mode had gone off in between.
Using it was rather easy and intuitive, although the menu key that has several functions seem a bit confusing at first -- just adjust all settings with the manual in hand and then don't touch them again :-)I'm not sure how long the battery lasts: I've used it for whole mornings or whole afternoons mostly sitting there on standby with maybe a few minutes worth of chat and it took several days like this for the battery indicator to get down to 2/3rd.It's a NiMH battery so it *will* have aging issues after a few years but by the time they start loosing their charge it will be more economical to simply buy a new set than replace the batteries.I do give it 4-star instead of 5 just because of the "iVox" hands-free feature: I just couldn't get it to work and the manual is not too helpful on that one. Like that I could skip carrying a watch.
I got these radios to keep a safety contact when I'm nearby in the forest, with hills and of course lots of trees in between. The radios are light to carry, they come with a handy belt clip.
I'm dubious of the utility of that mode anyway, so it doesn't really matter.If there's one feature I miss: I wish the radio would also display the current time.
We depend on our talkabouts for car to car close range communications and boat to boat line of sight communication both of which were very poor, to the point of just not using them, which put us in a very unsafe position at times. Very poor voice clarity and quality. My recommendation is to buy a set of Midland 900 or 950s and have a quality set of communicators. The Motorola 9500 was strongly recommended. However the set that I received turned out to be a piece of junk. I did call Motorola and was informed that I was past the warranty time and they would do nothing.
They work very well, voice is clear.I tested the range of these units by driving away from the other user, we kept talking until the signal began to break up, which was about.7 miles. This is the first pair of two-way radios I have used. Your mileage may vary.This was over relatively hilly terrain with quite a few trees.These units have connectors for a headset and also have voice activation.
Used the Motorola two-way radios on a 2000 mile road trip - great communications with day long battery life and swapping in AA Batteries did not decrease range of quality of transmissions. Great radios - a good buy at a great price.
While the two-way radios worked they only allowed for a 2 mile distance instead of the 25 mile distance advertised, which in our case was one of the main reasons this set was purchased.
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