Midland MXT275 GMRS Mobile Review, Power Output Test, SWR, & Range Test - How Far Will It Transmit?

don't be alarmed it's supposed to happen like this i know you may be frightened a little confused but just sit back breathe through your mouth and let it happen today i'm going to show you the midland mxt275 15 watt gmrs radio the midland mxt 275 costs 149 affiliate links below and midland did send me this radio at no cost so that i could share it with you my favorite viewer i'm going to go over all the features the strengths the weaknesses there are some weaknesses i'm going to do a range test power test and i'm going to let you know if the midland mxt 275 is the right radio for you the midland mxt275 it's a mobile radio the entire radio is all contained within the handset so you mount the handset up where you can see it you throw the chassis under the seat or out of the way you could mount it up on the dash like it shows here but i don't know why because you never need to touch the chassis again the little box this is the only part you're gonna ever interact with it's a lot like the old midland 75 822 handheld cb radio my first cb radio when i first got my jeep was the midland 75 822 cb radio i threw that in the trash because i moved to gmrs like any smart person would do but that old 75 822 the whole radio was in the microphone just like this so reading from the box the midland mxt 275 offers 15 watts of powerful communication fully integrated control microphone so the whole radio is all in that microphone 15 channels now you sharp eared viewers may recall that gmrs has 22 channels there are seven channels in the 22 channel spectrum of gmrs that you're only allowed to transmit at low power most high-powered radios like the midland mxt 275 most other brands just won't allow you to transmit on those channels midland takes a different approach instead of allowing you to listen to those channels and not transmit they've just eliminated those channels altogether because it could be confusing if you're allowed to listen to those channels but you can't transmit on them because of course somebody would try to transmit and then it doesn't transmit and then they're going to get confused and angry and contact support so to reduce confusion midland has just eliminated those channels 7 through 13. thus leaving you with a total of 15 channels 8 additional repeater channels usb c charging so you can plug your phone in charge it up speaker microphone jack to allow you to put in an external microphone jack to your microphone flexible mounting options it does have flexible mounting options now let's be clear right up front midland markets this radio to regular consumer people not to gmrs radio dorks if you're a gmrs radio dork if you're a gmrs expert this radio is not marketed toward you they don't they're not expecting you to buy this radio this is an entry-level gmrs radio marketed toward people who just need to get something into their vehicle and talk to whoever they need to talk to so when you buy the midland mxt radio i'm gonna go through what comes in the box so you know everything that you get this is not an unboxing video because every knows that unboxing videos are stupid when you purchase the mxt 275 you will receive a power cable the mxt 175 like a few of the other midland radios plugs into the cigarette lighter port or as many people insist on calling it the 12 volt dc port so one end plugs into the cigarette lighter the other end goes into the radio and it's got an inline fuse you will receive a quick start guide quick start guide which is very useful at getting you started quickly to use this radio so if you've never used a radio before this will tell you everything you need to know 10 simple steps to get it plugged in and turned on and talking to your buddies very helpful for the first time gmrs user you will receive a full user guide written in perfect english very simple very understandable [Music] a little small for us old people goes over installation how to use it all the options i always go on and on about user manuals because you can tell a lot about a radio by how much effort the company puts into the user manual midland has put a lot of effort into this user manual you will receive a little uh microphone mount that's for the whole radio actually will mount there it's got stickies so you can stick it onto something and it's got screws so you can screw it in more securely you will receive a midland sticker that you can stick on your closet door or your vehicle you will receive an additional fuse and some screws for mounting something to something you will receive an antenna this is a magnetic mount antenna that sticks to the top of your car the other end screws into the back of the radio i've mentioned on my other midland radio reviews this antenna is very small this cable is not even really a cable it's more of a wire and i'm very surprised that it works at all but not only does it work it works very well i'm going to do a range test so stick around for that you'll see how this dinky little setup actually works it works very well you will receive this sticky magnetic mount backside peels off stick that to a non-magnetic surface like the top of your fiberglass corvette and that will allow you to stick the magnetic mount antenna onto it but be aware this antenna requires a ground plane that means it needs to be on a large metal surface to give the rf electricities something to bounce off of into outer space so if you're putting this on a fiberglass car or a plastic fender or something using the sticky it's not going to work as well i'm going to talk a little bit more about ground planes using this antenna when i do the range test i'm going to teach the sad hams a lesson or two on ground planes and the english language you will receive the microphone which contains all the controls for the radio you control everything on that microphone let's not forget about this and you will receive the radio itself which is not very exciting because the exciting part the exciting part is the microphone on the radio there's a jack to plug in the microphone you've got a usbc charging port to charge your phone up with comes with this dust cover which just like the other midland radio with this usbc charger this will be lost within 10 seconds of unplugging it on the back you've got your so239 hole for plugging your antenna into it's got the wire which plugs into the power cord the other the other end of which goes into your cigarette lighter hole and you've got a plug for an external speaker it comes on this mount which is actually pretty slick once you figure out how to use it that allows you to easily remove the radio from its mount so you mount this to whatever you want it mounted on and then this can easily be removed [Music] once you read the instructions [Music] easily slides in and out once you know what you're doing now on the microphone which is basically for all intensive purposes this is the entire radio it connects to the chassis but you're never going to need to touch the chassis once you get it all hooked up so on the microphone now this is a weighted microphone when i reviewed one of the other midland radios i noticed how nice the microphone felt there was some controversy because when i tore it open i found steel plates i haven't torn this one open but it does feel weighted it is a very good feeling microphone it's heavy it doesn't feel light and plasticky but it is a very good feeling but midland knows how to make a microphone feels very good very satisfying when you hold it in your hand so we've got all of our controls we've got the menu a button for going in and changing settings call which makes a stupid and annoying alarm type sound lock button for locking it so that you don't accidentally hit a button menu options up and down weather it does pick up all the noaa channels you can scan through the weather channels and it does do weather alerts monitor that disables the squelch so that you can listen to all the static and very weak signals if you need it to scan button push to talk that's the button you push to talk it's got a plug for an external headset or microphone this is not the standard k-type plug it's just a bit smaller than the k-type plug i don't know off-hand what they call that size connector i'm sure someone will leave a comment and tell us on the top you've got your power on and off and then your channel up and down buttons the end that goes into the radio is a rj45 type connector plugs into the rj45 hole on the radio [Music] so i have the radio connected to my jeffery 1000 solar backup battery system so the jackery 1000 is providing the electrical energy so let's turn it on and first thing i noticed about this radio out of the box is that the speaker on the chassis is very very very loud it also has a speaker in the microphone and you can switch in the menu settings you can turn on just the speaker in the chassis just the speaker the microphone or both they are both very loud very well suited for being in the vehicle not very well suited for testing in the kitchen when your wife is in the other room trying to watch her stories the screen is uh it's about that big i don't have my tape measure so you're just gonna have to take my word for it that it's about that big it's very bright very easy to read and you can customize the colors in the menu settings got several different colors to choose from it does have a roger beat a very handsome sounding roger beep this radio is repeater capable it does do split tones but in order to use repeaters you have to go into the menus into the repeater option menu setting and turn that option on i had a gripe about that at first but then upon reflection i recalled what i said about this radio being marketed to regular consumers people who just want a radio to talk to their friends in the other car when they're traveling or whatever most of them probably won't need to use repeaters so it actually makes sense for midland to help keep it simple by just not having those options available to make it less confusing for the average normal person using this radio if you decide that you need to use a repeater you just go in and turn the option on so it does do repeaters it does do split tones it does not do multiple repeaters on the same frequency with different tones again that's something a little more advanced that people using this radio probably don't even understand what that means if you're watching this video and you don't understand what that means that's okay you are who should be buying this radio my biggest gripe with this radio is that it is narrow band only and what that means is i really should make a video explaining the difference between narrow band and wideband some radios are narrow band some radios are wide band most radios are wideband you can talk to each other if one is narrowband the other's wideband you can still talk to any other gmrs radio but in some cases when you're transmitting on a narrow band radio to a band radio the volume may be in some cases low bottom line is narrowband may sound quieter when somebody is listening on a wideband radio now the big thing that most people want to know is how far can i talk this is a 15 watt radio so the answer is you can talk pretty far but it does come with this i think i measured it six and a half inches from the base antenna with this skinny little wire and when i've done reviews of the other midland low cost radios many of the experts said that wire will never work i was a little bit uh doubtful of how well this antenna would work with the wire so let's just test it and see how far we can talk on it now as i mentioned before you do need a ground plane for this antenna to work optimally so normally what you do is stick it on the roof of your car in the middle or as close to the middle as you can get and the whole metal surface of the roof of the car will act as the ground plane thusly reflecting the rf electricities off of the metal of the roof of the car and up into outer space i do not have a metal car in my studio so what i'm going to do instead is the old pie pan trick this is a pie pan or pie or cookies or whatever it is metal so what i'll do is place the antenna on the metal pie pan and that will act as the ground plane now i did this in a previous video and many sad hams as well as helpful happy hams alike left comments pointing out oh it's it's funny how you can tell the difference between a sad ham and a happy ham just by the way they word their comment they pointed out that the ground plane surface for the frequency that gmrs is on needs to be six or eight inches around the antenna or it won't work and when i placed the antenna on the pipe and in my previous video i didn't place it exactly in the center which means it was less than six or eight inches on one side more on the other and they oh my god you'd think their heads were gonna explode saying it's not gonna work because it doesn't have a perfect ground plane so what i did i measured exactly painstakingly [Music] so that i knew where the exact center of the ground plane would be so that i could very carefully place the antenna exactly in the center so that i would have the perfect ground plane because all the sad hams pointed out that if it doesn't have a good ground plane it won't work will not work so i know the center of the ground plane and that's where i'm going to stick it because we're going to teach the sad hams the difference between will not work and will not work perfectly or 100 optimally so i have my antenna with the imperfect compromised ground plane sitting on the table over there and i have my friend chris who is 10.1 miles away overall near line of sight i'm where my studio is located there's several walls between me and his house but once you get past those walls it's i can almost see his house he's using a handheld radio with a signal stick antenna so it's one of those larger uh not a rubber ducky but a bigger rubber ducky so let's see if he can hear us testing one two one two chris do you copy yes randy i copy you without it clear sir what kind of a radio and antenna are you using down there and how do i sound [Applause] you sound uh a little bit of static and uh the antenna is a super elastic uh slim antenna pretty long uh but you're an it's and i got you at about seven bars out of ten so chris 10.1 miles away from his handset and my dinky little antenna with the compromised ground plane that the ham radio operators said would never work they're so smart and yet they don't know the difference between will not work and will not work perfectly my other friend conrad is 13 miles away in the opposite direction chris is that way conrad is that way and there's hills and trees and buildings it is not direct line of sight it's near line of sight but i cannot see his house from here a lot of stuff between us 13 miles away testing one two one two conrad do you copy come in [Applause] static readable so we've got chris 10 miles one direction conrad 13 miles the other direction on the little compromised little antenna and the compromised ground plane that the experts experts said will not work so now we're going to go even further there is a repeater that is 30 miles from my house it's direct line of sight it's across the valley setting up the repeater on the microphone was pretty easy the only thing that complicated it a little is that to get the codes you have to translate the codes the pl tones you have to go into the manual [Music] and look up the conversion chart to get the pl code number that you put into the radio you can't put the whole number in so there's this conversion chart it took a minute so it was easy to set the repeater up so now i just go to that channel alright so i'm on the right repeater channel and i'm just going to key up transmit to the repeater if i'm able to reach the repeater we'll see a little tone we'll hear a tone we call that a kickback record chunk so let's try that hit that repeater no problem and it even had a roger beep i've got another repeater 69 miles away let's see if i can hit that repeater with my compromised ground plane and my small antenna i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to key up is loud i'm going to key up if the repeater is able to hear the radio it will give that chunk of that kickback so let's see what happens [Music] so i hit it it responded back with its id code now you will notice that all i could chunked those repeaters ker chunked now the sad hams of the group will no doubt leave a comment that chunking is very bad well i could chunk both of those repeaters my radio didn't blow up neither of the two repeaters blew up although the repeater owners may consider that rude so the range right out of the box even with the not only was the uh ground plane compromised but i've still got the coil oh the other experts coils coiled cable many experts will tell you that if you coil up the cable or the wire that it won't work well it works pretty darn good no doubt it will work better if you don't coil it although some say it doesn't make a difference with it coiled up when i was doing my testing it did warm up slightly barely to the touch i could feel some warmth on the cable some experts have also left comments on some of my other videos that coiling up the cable not only will make it not work but it will start a fire well i did feel a slight bit of warmth sort of which means i'm losing some of that energy through the cable that should be spitting out the top of the antenna some people really need to understand the difference between will not work perfectly and will not work at all because it still works pretty good even with the coiled antenna and even on the compromised imperfect ground plane now the box says that this radio outputs 15 watts of power and as you probably know many radio manufacturers are notorious for saying one thing and delivering another so i have my handy dandy little swr and power meter so let's see just how much power this thing is putting out this is the best little swr and power meter that i've ever used it's like 40 bucks i'll put an affiliate link below channel 16 the official off-roading channel and let's see what kind of power we get [Music] 13 watts pretty darn close to 15 and for fun let's just check the swr on that dinky antenna with the compromised ground plane and the coiled wire that the experts said would not work so i've switched to the swr setting and let's see what we get on swr [Music] one point three seven to one on a compromise ground plane with a coiled up wire that the expert said wouldn't work not bad so who should buy this radio is this radio right for you and your active dynamic lifestyle if you're a gmrs dork and you're looking to add to your gmrs arsenal this radio is not for you this radio is for somebody that's new to gmrs or doesn't even know or care about gmrs and just needs a radio that their friends said get a gmrs radio so you can talk to us when we're off-roading or caravanning or whatever very simple to use very easy to connect and plug in no hard wiring comes with the antenna comes with everything you need to take it out of the box plug it in and turn it on and talk to whoever you need to talk to in two minutes my biggest gripe is how some of the screens are kind of difficult to read the letters the way they're formed once you go in and set up the radio if you even need to set up the radio you're never going to have to look at those again so if you just need a radio that you can take out of the box throw in your car talk to who you need to talk to and then when you're done wad it all up and throw it back in the trunk for a beginner you can't go wrong and the microphone feels really good if you have any questions about this radio about the testing that i did about why sad hams can't understand the difference between will not work at all and will not work perfectly 100 leave a comment below there are no stupid questions so don't feel shy about asking a legitimate question comments will be pinned to the top for everybody to laugh at so if you're gonna be a smartass that's my job that would include answering questions that nobody asked to make yourself look smarter or going off with a bunch of techno babble that nobody here cares about we're gonna pin it to the top thank you for watching and be sure to see my [Music]

Channel: NotaRubicon Productions

Views: 15,936

Rating: 4.9183674 out of 5

Keywords: Midland review, Midland mxt-275, midland GMRS review, midland mxt275, gmrs review, best gmrs for car, best gmrs for jeep, ham radio, sad-ham

Id: Dm9Hwx8vFnU

Length: 23min 29sec (1409 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021