Unfortunately, a lot of the good buddy rigs come already equipped for 10M these days....
Yeah, But unfortunately most 'Good Buddy' 10m rigs still sound like Good Buddy radios!
Over modulated and drifty.. I used to have a few of them at one time. You can make some mods to them tho to get them to sound nice on AM. They usually do have high outpoot modulation built in and some have 50w RF outpoot. It's just a matter of a little tweaking. As long as you get one that's got a REAL VFO and Freq counter. Many only read the PLL and display the frequency they are 'supposed' to be on and not the true frequency. Get one of the good ones and you'll never know the difference.
10-4 on the driftyness. But, IMO, you want decent comm quality audio rather than sooper dooper hi-fi, unless you are using the good buddy radio as an exciter for an amplifier...and I wouldn't recommend this on the grounds that the typical 4 watt good buddy radio is woefully underdesigned when it comes to suppression of spurs. Broadcast quality audio is great in the strapper world, but when operating with a PW 4 watt signal on 29 mHz, it can often make copy difficult. The exception to this is during sunspot cycle peaks when 10 is wide open. I used to have daily skeds with Pat W9GKZ in Wisconsin. We experimented with various power levels, and found that we could have "full quieting" AM QSO's with 3 watts each. Of course, Mother Nature was doing all the heavy lifting.
