Guess I was lucky to get mine then, so far so good, blude display on frequency and on channel display, has a lot more power than the Alpha I had and does recieve well, need a little more time using it to see what my locals say, the audio is so much louder on SSB when it was with the first version, I never took the stock mic out of the box I'm using the stock mic from a Magnum S9 WOW