As I understand it they are POS's plain and simple. Too much noise on reciveve, weather radio noise and recieve insanely poor! Bias set too high routinely at factory causing them to blow the final and driver even unmodified all the time. Weak audio on transmit. Very poor adjacent channel rejection and on and on and on........
The 980 is a sick pathetic joke compared to the Uniden Grant XL or XLT from the early 1990's. The President GrantIII and Lincoln II both based on Uniden boards are not that great as they ship from the OEM. I hear they can be though with some work from really good technicians.
The Display on the Uniden CB's are fairly dumb and unmodifiable. The CPU/PLL is also not ver friendly and really not effecient and poorly designed for anything other than being hard to modify.
I have yet to see anything that represents a huge step up from the 1980's AR-3500 or early 1990's RCI2950 or 1990's President Lincoln. I am still waiting.
We have black box radio's with dirty 4 transistor linear with lots of harmonics and cheap Chi-Com BJT transistors. The Galaxy and COnnex radio's are a step backwards since Ranger took over production. The new President Lincoln II and Grant III are both not advancements at all. The RCI2950DX has lots of features and freq. coverage but poor quality control and insane noise on receive side and the cheapest encoder's and buttons that money can buy.
No one makes an modern SSB CB radio that is worth owning. Galaxy is crap for anyne that wants to really talkon SSB because they are not stabil on SSB because of the cheap parts and lack of crystal filtering that is tight. The RCI2950 is great on SSB but is noisy as hell it will make your ear's bleed. The quality control on most of these radio's is a joke too. The Anytone OEM has a good Uniden Board design and good QC but a lot of the parts that go into them are questionable and end in early death. You also have the problem of obvious issues if you attempt to put them into legit Amateur service you see all kinds of issues show up. That said they are better than anything that carries an FCC Type acceptance if looking for SSB in a new radio. Sadly not all of the cap's are electrolytic cans with leg's a lot of them are SMD so it is not practical to recap them completely to attempt to eliminate early death!
I try to buy old school SSB CB's and just bite the bullet and recap and try to get ahold of NOS obsolete parts etc.....The alternative would be to spend big on amateur gear and pay for it to be modified.