gmrs-frs two-way radios

I purchased two pairs of Cobra PR 3000 GMRS 2 watt radios for our ski trip this year. It's one of the best purchases I ever made. I looked at Motorola and Midland before purchasing these. They have more power than Motorola and better built than Midland. I like that most of the buttons are on the face and you don't have to do a lot of menu browsing. We skied at Alta and Snowbird Utah. The ability to talk over the slopes really amazed me. We tried them out in our neighborhood and they worked pretty well. We could converse for a half mile with no trouble at all through trees and houses. However if you go behind a hill the ability to converse is greatly reduced. At Alta Snowbird you are in a canyon with granite walls, so I think the signal is bouncing off the canyon walls, becuase we could talk for miles, even with ridges between us. At the frequencies and power levels of these radios you should get great reception if you are in line of sight without too many obstructions. But don't expect to go much over a half mile if you have a lot of obstructions. If you are true line of sight with no obstructions, you can go further than the 5 miles advertised. In a granite canyon like little cottonwood canyon they were great! We were in a group of 8 skiers and it was snowing hard and difficult to stay together. My 12 year old daughter got separated from us and called in to let us know where she was. It saved hours of anxiety for us and kept us from ruining our ski day. Same thing happened the next day with my 11 year old daughter. As far as I'm concerned it was well worth the price.

My family bought Cobra PR 3000 radios for a cruise in December 2003 and were pleased overall.

They are simple to use. The LCD display is excellent. Volume and voice quality were good. The CTCSS tones worked well to screen out the many other passengers who had similar radios.

They are light and small enough that it was never a chore to carry them.

We often used the call signal and vibration features to initiate contact, because those work better than a voice in noisy areas.(Too bad those features are missing from every higher-powered, commercial-quality radio I've found.)

On the down side, within 48 hours of use, the poorly designed pocket clips broke off two of the four radios.

And their power and range were less than ideal. At high power (2 watts), we could easily communicate between five decks. Reception was sketchier or non-existent when trying to communicate from the bow on deck 11 to the stern on deck 3.

Ashore, the radios worked well over about 1/2 mile of hilly terrain. Beyond that, little or nothing. They did much better over open water, of course.

Cobra does make a 3-watt model, which might perform slightly better. But the built-in stubby antenna on all Cobras limits their performance, from what I've read of how UHF radio works.

Commercial radios, which would undoubtedly perform better, cost at least $130 each and are far less user-friendly. Makers include Icom and Vertex.