Radioddity GS-10B Pro Ham Radio

Holy Wow!!!

Okay this thing gets 5 full stars based on premise alone! And before buying, please read the entire post (you'll need it!)

This is exactly what the ham radio hobby needs -- an affordable UHF/VHF HT that has HF and shortwave receive capabilities. So new Technicians can at least listen to what they're missing out on in the world of HF while they study for their General ticket. No lie, it's radios like this that will become the new entry radio of choice for hams on a budget.

With that out of the way, I'll dive into the radio and how it works:

Standard VHF/UHF transmit and receive. The rubber ducky (stock UHF/VHF antenna) is absolutely exceptional. I can clearly hit my favorite repeater 37 miles away (from my kitchen!) with full quieting. It keeps the repeater open, I've gotten good signal reports, and receive sensitivity is really good (set squelch to 1). I'm not going to spend all day here going into commercial FM, NOAA, and air traffic control bands but I will say it receives all three better than any HT I've ever had. Now it will receive 1.25 meters (224 MHz), but sadly will not transmit on that band. But I rarely use that band, so I'll gladly accept the trade-off.

Where I should dock this review one full star is the documentation, or lack thereof. But it is Radioddity, and I'm sure at some point they will improve the manual. There's zero/zilch/nada when it comes to operating on HF with this thing. So I'll go into what I can in hopes the next person has a good starting point.

The bottom button on the left side of the unit (underneath the PTT button) is what toggles on/off HF receive. You have your choice of two antennas, basically the red one is LF/MF and the green one is MF/HF. That being said, the radio itself divides the spectrum up into LW, MW and SW modes. The manual and specs will show you how they categorize those frequencies. For the sake of example, I'll throw on the green "Donut SW Antenna", set the physical H/L switch on the left of the antenna to "high", set the radio "Work Band" setting to SW, and tune the radio to 14.300 MHz if I want to listen to the Maritime Net on 20 meters. If I want to listen to commercial AM broadcasts (500 kHz to 1.5 MHz) I just pop on the red donut AM antenna, Switch the Work Band to MW, and punch in my favorite AM sports news station and boom! I'm in business. Spectrum range is 500 kHz to 30 MHz, so you're getting pretty much everything out there, not just the ham bands.

The HF menu structure has a whopping 5-6 items. #0 is Modulation (FM/AM/CW/LSB/USB) -- #1 is AM Mem Cannel -- #2 is Work Band (LW, MW, SW) -- #3 is Frequency Step -- #4 is LNA (more later on that). Easiest HF menu navigation I've seen yet. Now there is a Bandwidth setting, but it only comes up in the menu when you're in SW mode.

Now as for the donut antennas... They work pretty much like how you'd think they'd work. The little red one is great for local AM commercial broadcasts and won't disappoint you. I'm listening to sports radio inside my home (quite well!) as I write this.

But I have to be honest here, if you're wanting to tune into long distance DX shortwave stations, or you're wanting to listen in on HF SSB conversations (ham operators), these antennas will leave a lot to be desired. They're basically non-functional on a bad propagation day (ie: solar flare), and only pull in strong stations on a good propagation day. On a great day, you'll pull in everything. But as we all know, those days can be few and far between. And if you've studied anything about ham radio, you know it's all in the antenna.

So here's where the rub is: Out of the box, as-is, listening to HF SSB transmissions will leave you feeling depressed. Voices will sound garbled, the "knobs" on the donut antennas won't change anything, and you might find yourself saying "this is junk" without making a couple little tweaks that SHOULD be listed in the manual.

The video I have is a POTA activation on 14.256 MHz and no, it was not even remotely intelligible at first. In fact, that guy's voice was 100% distorted and garbled and I almost gave this radio zero stars. Until I played around a little bit.

For decent shortwave or HF reception, you'll need to put up a wire antenna (or similar). I had one cut for 40 meters that I hang in a tree for QRP operations, and as you'll see in the video, I just hooked it onto one of the connection bars on the back of the donut antenna. A better idea is to wire in a good antenna with an SMA connector, but that design is 100% up to you.

WRITE THIS EXAMPLE DOWN, if you want to actually hear SSB voice on the ham radio bands:

Modulation is USB (for 20 meters of course). Mode is SW. Bandwidth set at 3kHz. LNA set to 0. And most importantly, set the BFO to +00500. It might vary for your particular radio but I'm guessing it won't vary much. That's the secret to making transmitting stations intelligible instead of distorted and garbled.

The settings listed above mean the difference between "HF junk" and "HF goldmine". This information should be in the manual, it isn't, so I put it here. And Radioddity owes me a beer on that one!

As for the advertised spectrum mode (scope), just hold down the V/M button. It's a nice function to have, although there's no documentation on how to use it (ie: tune the radio to a signal spike). But I'm sure there will be a YouTube video on that soon.

I went from wanting to give this rig zero stars and a place in my trash can to 5 full stars and "my new favorite HT" status. I'm not even joking. I reviewed the regular GS-10B (not this Pro version with HF receive) last January and it was my favorite UHF/VHF HT until now. The GS-10B Pro, with the right settings, is a dream for new and upcoming hams. The perfect entry radio in my opinion. One radio to transmit on UHF/VHF yet still receive on HF with full shortwave capabilities. The perfect radio for new technicians, I wish it had been out when I first got my tech license!

When this thing is tuned correctly and the settings are correct (listed above), the reception is actually better than my $500 QRP rig. It is impressive, when configured correctly.

I absolutely love this radio. I'll be getting a second for my go-box. 5 full stars.

Oh, and the battery from my regular GS-10B (not this Pro version with HF receive) works on this version! Kudos!!!

0:05

Grant Fritchey

June 20, 2026

A Whole Lot Of Radio

It's actually hard to describe just how much radio you're getting for the money. The easy part, it's a UHF/VHF, 2m/70cm, transceiver. But then, it receives, single side band, upper and lower, and AM. It covers a huge swath of bandwidth. And then, it comes with a couple of donut antennas to help cover that bandwidth. Beyond all that, you also can program the thing over Bluetooth using software on your phone. So, how well does it do all these things?

Shockingly well. Let's talk about it.

The radio itself is constructed out of pretty tough plastic. I've got it sitting next to a $300 radio and they look and feel pretty much the same. The face buttons are just slightly rubberized and feel different from the radio body. The PTT buttons on the side (yeah, there are two, second one being programmable) are more rubberized in feel. When pressed, everything has a pretty positive feel to it with a nice click. The on/off volume control knob is right on top. It works pretty well. The display as you can see is color and works nicely. It's readable, and you can control what gets displayed in terms of channel names, frequencies, etc. Transmission is pretty good. Signal reports are good. I downloaded the Customer Programming Software (CPS) from Radioddity. It's pretty standard stuff. Nicely, it includes the ability to import a CHIRP *.CSV file, so getting the radio programmed was a snap. I just imported from an existing set of channels and I was up and running on all my local repeaters. That was a very nice touch. Also handy because I couldn't get CHIRP to read from the radio. However, that doesn't matter much, because, there's a whole level of functionality for this radio that won't be on CHIRP. You need the custom CPS. Here's why.

This thing can receive Single Side Band (SSB), upper and lower (USB & LSB), as well as full AM and Carrier Wave (CW) meaning, Morse Code. The two donut antennas are attached to a second mount point (you can see an example in the pictures, SMA female opposite the rubber duck which is SMA male) and cover a huge range of bandwidth from 500khz to 2000khz on one and 4mhz to 24mhz on the other. In short, a giant swath of the radio spectrum covering quite a bit of the amateur radio frequencies. Out of the box, the third button on the side turns that "radio" feature on and off. Yeah, the whole thing is a radio, but that's what they call it's secondary set of reception through the second antenna. Turning that on, you get a second set of menu choices for the behavior of the radio. This lets you pick the bandwidth you want to receive as well as the type of signal. Wild stuff.

The key point here is, how well does it work? Well.... to be perfectly honest, OK, but not great. For example, there's a pretty strong signal at 10mhz, transmitting the universal time. It's a great way to quickly check HF reception on a radio. I couldn't get it to receive using the donut antenna. I also tried the one on 15mhz. No joy there either. I was able to pick up some digital transmissions on 20 meters. I had my HF rig (an Icom 7300, so I'm cheating in comparison, but I used it to drive me to good signals) side-by-side, trying to capture CW or other signals. They were coming through clear on my rig, and almost never on the handheld. Still, I was getting some. I was able to pick up some USB talk on the radio. So, it works, just not great. You can program channels for this from the CPS.

I'm not done with the functionality though. It's also got a band scope. You can set it to scan frequencies across a range. It will then show where you have good signals. I showed that in one of the pictures. You can adjust the squelch right on the screen so that it will only stop on certain strong signals. It works pretty nicely.

I already mentioned the CPS, but the magic is the bluetooth programming. This is become more of a thing all the time. My BTech GMRS base station radio has phone programming as does my BTech UV Pro handheld. The software that programs the GS-10B is a very Chinese piece of tech. I was a little uncomfortable installing it on my phone to be perfectly honest. However, once there, I had to turn on bluetooth on the radio, easily done from the menu. Then, you pair it up on the phone, and, ta-da, you can program the radio from the phone. The screen for programming the radio overran the size of my phone, so the buttons at the bottom were hard to see. However, it worked. I could read from the radio and write to it, from my phone. It's clunky programming though. Useful for from the field or on the go adjustments, but probably not the ideal way to set up the radio. Also, you can't program the expanded CW/LSB/etc. channels from the phone that I could find.

I also tried it on the air band for AM reception of airplanes. It worked better than other radios I have at this.

Overall, this is a really fun addition to my radio family. Sure, it's not the greatest at reception through the donut antennas (which, I didn't mention are adjustable through a built in dial), but it does work. It opens up a whole slew of things you could try to listen for, all on a very inexpensive, yet not at all cheap, radio.

I will add one thing that almost makes me want to leave a bad review. The manual that comes with the radio is pretty bare bones. It just covers the basic operations of the radio. Now, they have a full-sized manual covering everything in detail. However, they're actually charging for that. I think that's very poor form on the part of Radioddity. It's a great radio. We should be able to get the full manual without paying for it.