Midland Adds Repeater Access to Its Flagship Walkie: Midland GXT67 Pro Radio Review

“How about now?” 15 miles is a long distance for most walkie-talkies, but my voice was still coming in clear, transmitting from the Midland GXT67 Pro. Granted, this radio isn’t just any walkie-talkie, but a repeater-capable GMRS unit, and by leveraging a little radio know-how, it was booming over the heads of lesser handhelds.

The GXT67 Pro is the top of the line from the brand, and finally adds the ability to use repeaters — basically, remote signal amplifiers — which can greatly extend your range. Besides that, Midland gave the radio the full treatment, making it fully waterproof, boasting a long battery life, and giving it a user interface that doesn’t require a manual to figure out.

I folded the GXT67 into my everyday communication needs for a month and took it everywhere, from truck camping to whitewater paddling trips and scouting recent wildfire burns looking for morel mushrooms. Here’s what I learned about this little powerhouse communicator.

In short: The new Midland GXT67 Pro is likely the best handheld radio the brand has ever made. Despite some room for improvement, it makes a compelling case for getting a simple GMRS license and really leveraging these little radios’ power.

Looking for a new set of walkie-talkies? To see how the GXT67 Pro stacks up against the rest of the market today, check out GearJunkie’s Best Walkie-Talkies Buyer’s Guide.

Midland GXT67 Pro: Review

The Midland GXT67 Pro walkie-talkie looks like business. It’s actually wild that it’s taken this long to produce a walkie that doesn’t look like a lifesize G.I. Joe accessory, but credit where credit is due: the GXT67 looks slick. 

This radio is more than a pretty face, however. Shipping in a foam-lined case that’s reminiscent of a lower-protection Pelican case, the GXT67 is ready to rumble. Rated at IP67 water- and dust-proof (thus the name), this radio is far from a toy and can be fully submerged up to 3 feet for 30 minutes.

As a GMRS radio, you’ll need to obtain a license from the FCC to operate it, but the process is dead simple, and once you’ve got one, you’re set for 10 years. Do that, and you’ve got access to all 5 W the GXT67 Pro is capable of transmitting (double what your FRS radios can push) and, new for Midland, access to GMRS repeaters. Here’s what I learned about the handheld over a few weeks of use.

GMRS Repeater Ready

When I’ve previously used GMRS radios from Midland (the GXT1000VP4), I was dismayed to see that while those handhelds hosted the full 5W power output that GMRS radios can sport, the radios weren’t repeater-capable. No longer on the GXT67 Pro — this radio is repeater-ready.

A repeater is best thought of as a remote amplifier station, picking up your signal and boosting it with more transmission power to get your voice out to a much wider audience. Radio nerds across the country (and indeed the world) have set up and operate these stations, sometimes for public use, and sometimes for private.

The GXT67 Pro is Midland’s first handheld to access this functionality, and it does so excellently. To test this, I keyed up the local GMRS repeater, which corresponded to channel 23 on the radio. I was about 3 miles from the antenna, which is mounted atop a 500-foot hill here in town. 

Three miles was no problem getting into the repeater, and even after moving out to 15 miles, I could still get my signal in enough to be able to have it picked up by my partner on the other side of town. A good showing for the GXT67.

Head to Head With the Rocky Talkie 5-Watt Radio

GMRS radios are having a bit of a moment. The small fuss you’ll need to navigate in securing a license from the FCC opens up a great bit more communication power, which also means there are plenty of stellar GMRS handhelds out there currently.

One of those is the Rocky Talkie 5-Watt Radio ($180), a radio that I’ve used extensively. Specing out at IP67, 5 W of transmission power, and also repeater-capable, the two handhelds are fairly similar, but they do have some notable differences: For one, the Rocky Talkie supports a removable antenna and battery, as well as a better optional hand mic.

The GXT67 Pro, on the other hand, incorporates automatic noise cancelling into its microphone, and the display is far more refined than the Rocky Talkie, relaying a good bit more information. This interface is also user-customizable (using a separately available AVP34 cable), but even without this functionality, I found the menus very easy to navigate through.

To accurately test the GXT67 Pro, I set it head-to-head with the Rocky Talkie to see where it excelled and where it still has some room to improve. First off was a range test, where I aimed to challenge the GXT67 in both unobstructed and complex terrain. This took the form of some wide-open farmland, as well as some dense forest in the hills outside of town.

In the flatland test, the Midland radio was able to transmit a mostly clear signal up to 8 miles and 3 miles in the forest, compared to the Rocky Talkie, which could hit 9 miles and 3, respectively. Pretty even results, all things considered.

An Impressive Battery Life — With One Flaw

Midland equipped the GXT67 Pro with a reserve tank of battery — a 2,500 mAh Li-ion cell that’ll net you around 4 days of solid use, Midland reports. My testing showed that this was just about right on the money, and that keeping the radio in a lower power output will get you even more run time.

The battery itself, however, isn’t removable and instead sealed into the radio. Midland reasons this provides a better waterproof package in the long term and notes that lithium-ion cells have a long lifespan on their own. Both are solid points, but the fact that you can pop the battery out on the Rocky Talkie 5-Watt and it’s rated at the same IP67 puts the GXT67 a bit on the back foot.

There’s also some functionality you’re missing out on. Some users may want to purchase a second battery to hot swap into the radio without waiting the 4 hours it’ll take to fully recharge the unit. And, while lithium-ion cells do last a long time, they aren’t infallible, and eventually will start to degrade. Once that happens, you’ll likely be done with the radio anyway, but it’s something to consider.

Offroad Ready?

Somehow, the GXT67 Pro doesn’t support a user-removable antenna — one of the features that distinguishes FCC-rated GMRS radios from FRS units, and for many, a big deal. Namely: off-roaders and overlanders. 

Those who rig up GMRS radios in their rigs for trail rides will know that running a small, magnetic antenna on their roof and into a base unit in the cab is the way to go. Midland even offers a range of different antennas and mounts. However, these are aimed at the brand’s line of MicroMobile radios, which are more permanently mounted units.

That said, I did run the GXT67 Pro as a mobile rig radio for a few days, and the results weren’t half-bad. When used side-by-side with the Rocky Talkie (running the brand’s stock 7.5cm antenna), results were similar from the driver’s seat of my truck. However, when I switched to the 17cm Rocky Talkie antenna, the 5-Watt radio did pull away a bit in terms of transmission and reception clarity.

The included car charging dock certainly shows that Midland was thinking of off-roaders when building the GXT67 Pro, but I’d love to see some refining in this area in the future.

Midland GXT67 Pro: Conclusion

Quibbles aside, the Midland GXT67 Pro is a solid GMRS radio, and certainly the best handheld from the brand so far. Its form factor blows the others in the GXT line away, and the IP67 rating is the real deal when it comes to a radio that can be run hard and put away wet. 

Compared to the Rocky Talkie 5-Watt, the GXT67 Pro is a radio I’d see using more often in less austere environments (the 5-Watt, for example, is my whitewater paddling radio of choice). Not because it can’t hang in tough conditions, but because it’s simply a larger radio that’ll take up some more space.

Instead, the Midland radio excels when it comes to ease of use, battery life, and keying up repeaters when aiming to communicate across long or complex distances. The GXT67 Pro is a radio that’s easy to put into someone’s hands and quickly instruct them on usage, and there’s certainly a high technical ceiling to grow into.