Home > Consumer Reviews > Audiovox GMRS2000 GMRS/FRS Base Station

This is an excellent unit for the money. With BNC antenna
connector, external antenna can be utilized and Motorola speaker
mic #50225 can be used in provided jacks. Also unit may be
installed in vehicle as it is powered by 12 volt DC. Overall,
unit is a great buy!! Five stars plus!!

Im very pleased with the radio, I did have several problems shortly after the purchase(4months) 1- the Display became very hard to see. 2- The battey charger died. I contacted Audiovox tech. support, they had a flat fee for repair with exceeded the purchase price of the radio. I deal with alot of communications equipment and feel the warranty is way to short, if I remember it was 30 days and isnt the industry standard..1 year.

I picked up one of these FRS/GMRS gems years ago, and don't see them on the market anymore. I'm not sure if they are fully legal now (they must have been then to be sold), because the unit has an external antenna jack, whereby you can easily hook up a 440MHz Ham Radio base station antenna and greatly extend the unit's range a great deal. I believe it is not legal to have this external antenna capability for FRS radios (this unit has some FRS channels), but it's legal for GMRS. In any case, if you can find one of these excellent units, pick one up as they are now rare and sought after. Hook up an external base antenna with '9913' type low loss coax cable (50 feet or under), and you'll get several miles range with this unit. In retrospect, I should have bought a few of these!

I read all the sales ads. They didnt tell me much about the radio. Here are some facts.

15 Channels, 1st 7 are FRS, last 8 are GMRS.
There is a Scan function, although it scans slowly, it works nicely.
Distance and Reception is EXCELLENT.
Its possible to program for CTCSS, if your other radios are capable, this could be useful.
Power switch, volume work great.
Vox didnt work well for me, maybe if I was in a non-quiet environement. There are 3 settings, hi/med/lo, I had to use hi, and still yell into the mic before it would activate.
Transmission was very clear.
You are limited to the programed channels, there is no way to include the 'left out' channels or even swap some of them.
You must manually set each channel for Hi power that you want to be on high. (default is low).
There is an emergency button on the radio (?useless?).
Antenna is better than I thought it would be. Ac Adaptor is bigger than I thought it would be. I came with 5 rechargable batteries, they seem high quality. You have to flip a switch to charge the batteries??? Thats right, and the batteries must charge for about 24 hours. I dont mind doing this, but shouldn't they charge automatically?
This is wall mountable, and the mounts are the standard slide on slots you would see on any other small unit.
The display has large characters on it making it easy to read, but as the sun goes down, it gets harder to read. There is a backlight, but as you push the 'out of the way' button, the light only stays on for a couple seconds. The items on the display are informative though and the other lights on the unit are useful.
Weather channels worked great, but I had no doubts here.
There is a lock button, so noone can change channels accidentally, I like it.

Overall, I like the radio. It can be used easily right out of the box. Or you can spend a little time setting it up, just for fun. Transmission, reception was very clear. The limitations of the availible frequencies are acceptable, as long as everyone who tries to communicate with you knows about your channel limits. Again, very simple and easy to use. Workmanship and Quality was better than I had expected.