UHF Radio's

I have a TX 3345 which is mounted out of sight under the steering wheel as all the controls are on the mike. The reasons are this,
1. The radio is out of sight giving less clutter and a very easy installation and no holes to be drilled.
2. Never found a UHF radio where you could hear it clearly with the window down let alone a CD playing. Their speakers are small and behind the dash usually. I have a cord stung between the grab handle behind the front seats and I hang an extension speaker from this right near my left ear. I can clearly hear the UHF with the window down and even a CD playing provided it is not really loud.

Tip;
It is best to have a cable with no joiners from your aerial to the UHF unit. When installing a new radio make the aerial cable an extra metre (i did 2 metres) or more so that in the future if you have aerial problems and have to cut some of your cable off you have some spare to pull through and so avoid having to put in a joiner. The excess cable you just cable tie in some convenient location out of site.
Hope this is helpful.

There are definately reasons why some of the radios are cheaper IronJosh.

However you may never know or be affected by those reasons.

They include simple things like electronically poor ways to internal regulate power so radio uses more than than a better design does - but would that worry you ?

Other things include the fact that they might be only 1/2 as sensitive as others and you would never know - why because more and more no longer include specifications in there user guide . A friend just got a sub minature TX 3100 for xmas but I haven't followed it thru just yet to see how it stacks up apart from fact that it communicates quite well in convoy stuff.

I needed some more junk UHFs the other day and brought there competitor the Oricom UHF300 - these sell for around $145.

1 failed out of the box as was replaced and now I have 2 good ones.

I was interested to see how they cut corners and one of the tricks is with the scanning.

With 80 channels scaning is more of an issue these days as it takes longer.

This radio takes around 10 seconds to scan the Band in OS mode.

Now like most radios they have the ability to scan selected channels - this sounds good as out in the dessert I often like to monitor just 3 or 5 main channels.

So if you thought it would be a lot faster to scan 5 channels instead of 80 you would be wrong.

Because of low grunt processors etc when it scans it still scans 80 when set to 5 however it just doesn't stop on the other 75 if they have a signal.

Hence it still takes 10 seconds and you loose lots of ability to hear other traffic.

Note - others may bring up GS mode scanning , in this mode they check for a priorty set channel which will be found quicker but rest of scan still takes 10 secs.

Still the UHF300 delivers what I wanted for the cheap price.