This was my first Ham Radio and basically the reason why I got my Ham License. The radio itself seems pretty sturdy but I have been told that BTECH (Baofeng) radios are not very drop resistant. However, with that aside, I really like this radio.If you pair this radio up with a good Nagoya Tri-Band antenna you can get pretty good coverage of your local area. In my case, I am able to hit repeaters that are 20 - 40 miles away. For people in urban area's, that is good enough.The battery life is also pretty good. I tested mine out by just having it listen in to channels and it had a 3 day life. Which, again, a lot more than I expected. If you are not happy with this, you can get a bigger battery that should give you a 6 day standby time.There are also a wide selection of accessories for this radio and the other Baofeng's. So if you just have to have the attached mic, you can get one.The only really big down side to this radio is that it is a super-pain to program. I mean, to the point that you should really buy the programming cable with this radio and just program it via the Chirp software. Just get used to the point that you are not going to get good at programming this radio and you'll need your computer to help you do it.Other than programing the radio, everything is pretty simple it. You can easily setup scanning and hopping over to other channels or frequencies (Programming in special configs for channels is actually a pain).