Midland GRMS base stations

lots of grms radio's in mexico, as I said highway construction crews use them and you hear them on the GRMS frequencies not just the 1-14 FRS channels. You hear Mexicans on GRMS channels a lot in larger towns and I have seen them for sale in stores down there. They sell handhelds in walmarts, Costcos, Mega, etc. I hav ebot seen the base station radiso for sale, not even the 5 watt midland you can buy in walmarts in the US. The midland antennas are magnetic just for convenience, when I mentioned it to Midland that they did not appear to need a ground plane, they did not contradict me. Nothing mentions it in the instructions. In practice we have found it does not matter. We did a lot of testing on this as lots of participants have class A's with fibreglass bodies and it was always an issue wth CB's. We tested a 5 watt version (mxt105) on bith an aluminum Ford and a fibreglass class A with the antenna doubled side taped to both and I was able to converse 3 km away on other side of the town of Teotihuacan which has a lot of stone colonial buildings in the way. Past 3 km it started to fade, but he could hear my 15 watt version for almost 5 km. This was the first year we used them and we had 5, 15 & 40 watt GRMS and CB's on that trip and we could not communicate via CB's between the same 2 locations. We compared both them & CB's over a wide variety of conditions and the CB's came nowhere close to being as good. We axed CB's on the next trip and now use GRMS exclusively. Customers like them because they can do a temp install if they dont want to keep them and we can resell them the next season.