We have investigated in detail the operating properties of Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) detectors with a double conical and a cylindrical structure in a wide range of external fields and GEM voltages. With the double conical GEM, the gain gradually increased with time by 10%; whereas this surface charging was eliminated with the cylindrical GEM. Effective gains above 1000 were easily observed over a wide range of collection field strengths in a gas mixture of $Ar/CO_2(70/30)$. The transparency and electron collection efficiency were found to depend on the ratio of external field and the applied GEM voltage; the mutual influence of both drift and collection fields was found to be trivial.