Midland MXT275 GMRS mobile radio review

hey Lyle here again I wanted to take a look today at this Midland n.ex.t 275 gmrs mobile this is an interesting unit I I got this one for my my Toyota Tacoma some of you may know I do over landing and also a ham radio operator but not everybody on a given trip is going to be a ham radio operator so I wanted to have a FCC legal part 95 compliant gmrs radio to use in the truck but I also wanted something that was pretty small that I don't have a lot of space to mount a display so I really liked the format of this radio with the with all the controls in the handheld speaker microphone that was a pretty unique design pretty interesting 15 watts is going to be more than enough power for the things I'm wanting to do with it especially with a decent external antenna so let's uh let's take a look at this well this video is really small and what that's one of the things I really like about it you can see here for a size comparison I've got a Swiss Army knife and a GoPro and then let me just grab my Google pixel smartphone here and you can see from a size comparison the actual transferring RF device here is really really small which I really like you can see it's got the Midland model MXT 275 we've got our FCC ID on the label there when they look at this FCC ID it is part 95 compliant but it's what the older it's not magnified II it's the older compliance so just a quick walk around the radio this unit here comes with a really cool mounting system so the mounting base allows you to slide the radio into this it can be slid in into either orientation so I've got speaker going up at this point or the speaker going down really nice mouthing I really like this nothing a lot so both of the other connections on this device on the back a standard so2 39 socket for PL 259 antenna connector a small external speaker Jack that's a 3.5 millimeter jack it's rated for 4 watts of output built-in speaker I've got a standard rj45 jack which is uh pretty pretty cool because in my vehicle I'm gonna actually try to use some Ethernet cable in order to extend where the control unit sits compared to where this actual unit will sit behind my rear passenger seat and then we've got a USB port on here for charging devices this isn't for firmware updates this is just USB power in order to you to charge devices from power cord perspective it it's got this type of lead haven't seen one of these on any amateur radios I've worked with before it is keyed so you can't put it in backwards it's got the square and round which is nice and it comes with a cigarette lighter adapter I already cut mine off because everything that I do in my vehicles is all with Anderson power poles but I've already terminated this with Anderson power poles I'll probably take the cigarette lighter adapter out the other end and match power poles on it so somebody else could use it in their vehicle but I've already changed it over to Anderson power poles for the microphone hanger it's got a pretty nice microphone hanger this is a spring-loaded little nub in here that will retain and catch clip on the back making a little bit harder to bounce out when you're on a four-wheel-drive trail it is an adhesive back on here I don't see anywhere where you can do through-hole screw but I will take the part and people look at what's behind this uh this back plate here the antenna that came with it say um pretty small antenna comes with twenty well mate just between 19 and 20 feet of antenna cable it does have the PL 259 connector on the end of it so this might be a little bit difficult to run to the outside of your vehicle if you're trying to pass it through some sort of cavity it's not a removable connector it it doesn't have a SMA on here which would have been nice because then you could have home would have only had to pass the SMA connector it's really like a firewall if you're gonna run this to the outside of the vehicle but not bad for a little 110 that's included ok I've gotta have been connected the radio RF up to a dummy load here sitting under this table I've got the power leads connected into a 12-volt power supply now as you can see I've taken the the microphone handheld unit here plugged it into the rj45 jack on the front panel of the radio and put the dust cap in for the USB cover so let's go ahead and power the radio on and take a look at some of the functions so I've got the backlight display already set the orange I think it's up shows up a little bit better on camera and orange and some of the other colors but let's just talk about what we have on this hand mic so going around on the top of it we have our up and down buttons these are our channel buttons we have the power button you can see I've put my gmrs callsign a printed out into the front here on the side we've got our push-to-talk button very nice click on that push-to-talk and definitely feel it this units a nice in my hands to hold good feel on it on the other side interestingly we actually have a midland speaker microphone jack on here so you could actually plug in a headset or obviously an external speaker mic and I can think of a couple of situations where them might come in handy obviously if you're in a noisy environment having an earpiece in would be very handy but internet-based put that on the side kind of like that feature across the the radio itself it is a segment display so it's kind of hard to understand what the different many options are without a cheat sheet I always put my manuals as PDFs on my tablet so I always have them for quick reference but we have a menu button here call button a lock this is our volume up and down monitor button and the scan button first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and increment my channel and you'll notice that while this is a gmrs radio which we have 22 frequencies that we can use you'll notice that as I go up we go from channel 7 and we jumped straight to channel 15 and that's because this radio came out in 2017 2018 before the FCC rule changes so this has the from a gmrs perspective it can't transmit on channels 8 through 14 so you just will not be able to use those with those FRS handheld radios not a big deal it does have the rest of the channels in here the first I think it's a 4 7 channels are low-power and then we get into the high-power channels and I and now on the repeater challenge you'll notice on display here a little RP right next to the channel number showing that this is a repeater channel so if I have a mountaintop repeater that I've linked it into and you can see I've got this one programmed up with a dcs tone and we'll get through how to program those and back to channel 1 so there's circular I can go up and down which is pretty handy alright let's go and get into the menu here and people look at our options so if I press menu I'm on channel 1 which is one of our low-power channels not matters here in just a second as you'll see so the first option I have here is for PT or privacy code the next one is actually supposed to be powered but because this is channel 1 channel 1 is only allowed to use low-power so I actually don't see that in the menu and you'll see that the timeout on the menu is actually quite quick there if I don't make a selection in a few seconds it will go ahead and go back to the main screen menu again here now we see the selection of what looks like to be five nine or s 9 that's actually supposed to be sq4 squelch so there's our SQ for scotch RB for the horrible roger beep man I can't not stand the rocky beeps on radios like these so I always try to disable that if it's possible you can see this Roger beep is set to OFF right now and that is either on or off as I move on to the call alert tone another thing that I'm not a big fan of on these videos is call alert tones you can see that this call this is a color tone 0 1 there's 5 different tones on here again I'm going to hit menu again keep going forward BP so BP this is for beep so silent option so I mentioned earlier this has got a pretty lot of beep in it so I've already disabled the beeping in this menu again we'll go to the next one repeater so this turns on or off the repeater channels so if you don't ever use any repeater just want to make a little bit faster to go up and down to the channels you can disable repeaters I have mine set on because I actually do use the repeater function of this radio and then lastly we have our DB or display background this is kind of cool we can change the colors of the background here and let me just cycle through those I hit menu then I have to hit the lock button and then we can cycle through the different colors now I think with at least my setup here with the camera orange comes through the best and we'll go ahead and get back to that so let's go through and actually using the radio first thing I need to do is I've got a red vez Archy 76 here I've got it programmed on a particular DCS code I think I've got for 116 in and on channel 19 so what's part of this guy down alright so this radio is on channel 19 now now I need to set the same thing up on this video so I'm gonna go ahead and hit channel oops that's my volume I'm gonna hit my channel up to go every channel 19 set the high power I'm now at the mini button I'm gonna navigate through the menus here so first thing I might do I'm gonna set my power to low don't need a higher power for that and you can see it didn't take that input because I didn't press the lock key again to confirm so now it's confirmed as well next thing I need to do is to set my my CTS using my dcs tone so I'm gonna go here I'm gonna go from off CT CSS digital coded squelch so yes I want digital coded squelch now have to pick my my code I've already looked up in a manual which code I need which is code number 17 so let's go ahead and get to code number 17 which is that ECS code of one one six so we'll go ahead and confirm that tone make sure I've got some volume set here oops that's my channel so my volume check check excellent so it is coming through just fine on that dcs tone of one one six on gmrs channel 19 so one of the other cool features of this radio that I like is that it does have a speaker in both the base as well as in the handheld microphone and you can choose to have it output on one the other or both and you get to that by pressing the lock button here and it's not super intuitive on what they stand for but if I press the lock button here we see the menu that comes up and it says H 0 H 0 AO which means it's outputting on both the handheld unit and the base unit I'm not quite sure already they choose to use that terminology but I wanted to change these settings I can go in here and press up and down in order to get through all of them in my case I like having both of them active so I'm going to do H o AO and both speakers are now active on this device alright so just two more features want to cover here one is going to be setting it up for a repeater so I do have my my repeater currently running into a dummy load in the home office here so let me go ahead and let's set it up for my repeater channel 19 with the correct ECS code you can see how my channel 19 right now but on the display you'll notice that what's missing is the RP indicating a repeater channel so let me go ahead and change my channel here I need to get to channel 19 with RP and it's set up for dcs with a dcs code of 7-0 and you have to reference the manual to know what that map's to that's actually dcs code 627 in which is the wrong one for this so I'm going to go ahead and change that in order to change it I'm going to go to the menu I have my PT and I can see that on PT it is set for DCs I'm gonna click the lock button again and lock one more time and now I'm going to change my dcs code down to number 17 because I've already looked up that dcs code 1 1 6 n is equivalent to number 17 on this radio now one really important thing to know about this radio yes it does report to support repeaters it does not support split tones that's really important because a lot of repeaters that I've seen at least certainly in the area where I live here in Arizona you'll have a different input tone than output tone meaning you'll transmit with one tone but you'll receive with a different tone or just carry your squelch and this radio does not support that functionality so if you have repeaters in your area that requires split tones this unit will not work with those repeaters alright so I've got a repeater channel 19 set I'm on high power I'm going into a dummy load over here so it doesn't really matter and I'm on DCs code number 17 which again that maps to one one six and so let's go ahead and keep the transmitter and see if I can get our response from the repeater yep there we hear the curtsy beep these devices are sitting probably about ten feet apart both running into dummy loads but we can see that I am outputting power we see the red transmit button coming through here and on the on the hand hill itself we see the indication but it is transmitting we changed the green on the way back again see our signal strength coming through and use my repeater ideating itself with my FCC gmrs callsign so thus can I simply press this button and now this device is scanning through all of the programmed channels on the radio stop the scan I can just press the button again will squelch I don't have to hold just a momentary press will blow that squelch and then not weather and I probably won't hear any weather on here because I don't have an external antenna I'm running into a dummy Road but it does scan to other channels alright so I've got the radio on the bench I have it the radio is connected into the radio port of the diamondettes X 400 meter here then the antenna port of that is connected into our dummy load so the first thing we need to do is to calibrate the the meter for the frequency we're going to operate on so I've got the the midland right now set to channel 1 let's focus on channel 1 which is a low power channel and so the first thing we're going to need to do here is to set up our meter in order to take a look at that so I'm gonna go to calibrate we're going to set it for thee let's go for the 5 watt range this is a 5 watt frequency here and let's go ahead and calibrate this and so to calibrate it I need to put in calibrate mode transmitted and then turn the dial until it gets right on the line there so we are now calibrated and next thing I want to do is just check SWR we'll look at our reflected on SWR I'll go ahead and transmit again here so not a perfect match we're still under 1 to 2 but we may see some power being reflected back in and then lastly let's go ahead and go to forward power I have power set to forward now power and 5 watts let's see what we get so we're coming in there about 4 watts now if I switch to reflected power you can see that we're getting a little bit less than half a lot of power being reflected so we'll call about four and a half watts we're seeing out of the radio into that dummy load there all right next we're gonna do is try on high-power so I need to switch to a high power frequency so let's go here and go ahead and change this let's go to channel 19 for high power alright so I need to set the meter up for high power and for this different frequency so radio is rated at 15 watts so we're gonna go to 20 on the meter we're going to calibrate and turn power remote off let's go ahead and transmit and I'm pegging the meter so let's go ahead and adjust that so our rest of you are again not a perfect match we're about just under 1/2 probably 1.8 so we'll certainly see some power reflected in reflected back so now let's go ahead and look at our power forward into the dummy load so power forward into the dummy load coming in about 13 and a half watts there and then power being reflected back because that in that SWR mismatch and hard to tell on this scale here those Umi tin but it looks like we're we're coming in close to that 14 50 watts in total power if we measure forward and reflect it and add them together so that's it that's the MXT change 75 from Midland once I get it installed the truck I'll do a follow-up video just showing how I've installed it and how I used everyday but overall happy with the build quality of the radio it's a fantastic size I love the fact that has a separate speaker mic with the controls built into it on a downside it doesn't do the FRS channels it's only 15 watts out max power which is probably going to be good enough for most applications and then it does not do split tones split tones are important for many repeaters not all but many repeaters do use split tones this doesn't have that but if it's a standard repeater where you use the same tone for input and output you'll be good to go thanks everyone

Channel: Tech with Lyle

Views: 20,840

Keywords: GMRS, Midland, MXT275, FRS, Repeater, FCC Part 95, GMRS Radio

Id: a_9jugPLgRg

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020