What's a good affordable long-range walkie talkie?

TedV

TedV

Joined
Jul 18, 2000
Messages
1,289
Can anyone advise on a good, affordable, long-range walkie talkie?

Usage will be having a communication between my wife and kids and myself when I talk a small walk in the mountains or woods when there is no cell phone coverage. Also, some disaster recovery planning as well ;)

Midland Radio have some models that can do 30 mile (ideally). Are there any similiar types? Perhaps some that also run on AA lithium batteries?

Thanks,
Ted
 
It's that "ideally" where the catch is. But still, I've used the ones that you're talking about. In the rugged CO mountains, they get around 2-3 miles decent reception. And the difference between talk, no-talk is almost immediate. It seemed like I either could communicate well or nothing.

The nice thing about these radios is the extra channels, (upto 42) which other radios don't have. I used the (included) rechargeable pack, but carried 4 AA's for backup, but never needed them. The option to silence the 'roger beep' and the 'call feature' was nice for not spooking wildlife.

I like mine, I don't think you will be dissapointed in them.
 
Keep in mind that without a repeater in between the two radios in use, most FRS or GMRS radios are line-of-sight reception. 98% of the reception ability is antenna placement (line-of-sight) and only about 2% is the transmission power.

So, given that, you can get one of the Motorola or similar hybrid FRS/GMRS radios - they're not too expensive - and see how that works.

Ham radio operators (I'm not one) have been known to use other "tricks" to broadcast farther distances. Besides using repeaters (which help a lot because those repeater antennas are usually in a very tall good line-of-sight locations) they've been known to bounce signals off of the atmosphere and even the moon (go figure - they are so smart!!). The Ham radio is your best bet, though not the simplest.
 
The moon doesn't reflect radio waves well so to do a EME [earth-moon -earth] you need a large antenna array. Radio waves are usually bounced off the E layer. Also they can be bounced off special satellites, meteor tails and aurora !! They don't bounce off clouds.
An FRS radio which is 5 mile range ideally, in the mountains here will do about 1.5-2 miles.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top