I have an old Telex VHF system in a cupboard somewhere. An ENG 100 I believe it is. When it was in regular use I mainly used it with a handheld mic. Generally worked fairly well. I also had a beltpack, and I don't recall ever having a good clean signal from it.
I thought the build quality was fairly ordinary and it only had a jack plug for an output. But, I guess you get what you pay for. In the grand scheme of things it was cheap. I bought a Lectro UHF diversity system after that and the difference is huge.
Since having that setup a number of years ago, Telex seem to have introduced some more rugged looking UHF models which I would think would be more reliable than my experience. Unfortunately I can't talk about those.