They're great around the farm, and we keep one on in every building. It's like an intercom system that way, except you can pick up any radio if an animal gets loose and takes off, and get help looking for it. Also, my son and his wife took a car trip of about 1,000 miles a couple of years ago with a bunch of friends in several separate cars, and the radios gave them a way to stay in touch.
For the price, they're fine and work pretty well. I don't really buy the distance claims, but they work fine where we use them.
My two mile walkies reached 0.7 miles in Rochester, NY, so I'm with you on the distance claims. Car to car, line of sight, should work well. And 14 clean channels. No skip, and no cross channel. Yet. Until someone figures out how to make a cheap linny and splatter the band.
That's a good idea, to keep a set in the charge stands, in each of the buildings. That would make a good intercom.
My church's summer camp uses them for local communications. They have rechargable ones. They were getting some static. But setting the quiet code helped with that.
Here is the fine print on some with the advertised 10 mile range.
The communication range quoted is calculated based on an unobstructed line of sight test under optimum conditions. Actual range will vary depending on terrain and conditions, and is often less than the maximum possible. Your actual range will be limited by several factors including, but not limited to: terrain, weather conditions, electromagnetic interference, and obstructions.
All you have to do is find a place where you can see for 10 miles.
At work talkies are used all the time. They are the high dollar comercial 5 watt units. Due to the ammount of steel in the buildings we have a hard time talking 500 feet sometimes. The building is very large (about 40 acers under roof. The talkies work good outside the buildings.
We had that problem too. Campus a quarter-mile on a side, with one six-story wing and one steel-framed 14 story tower, and multiple smaller buildings and service tunnels. Lotsa dead spots, especially below the layer of steam pipes in the basement. I ended up putting a repeater on the roof of the 14 story tower. We can talk over most of the county, now, with 5 watt handhelds. For a situation like yours, they do sell solutions involving little antennas attached to the ceiling in each building, talking back to the base station via your corporate LAN. Mini-repeaters, basically.
I am quite impressed with the quality of the camera on my current phone. It has decent low light capability, AF, panoramic stitching. The only real thing it lacks is a long lens.
My phone has 24 Gb of memory. Since I have a 4 Gb mp3 player it really isn't any sort of handicap. The main point is I don't need to put my batbelt on if I don't want to and still have acceptable capabilities.
When I was a kid watching "Flash Gordon" at noon and "Captain Video" at dinner...WTs were a huge dream at the war-surplus outlet (never had one). (I made 2 when I was about 12 that had a 100 ft range!)
You won't, but if two people on the same frequency are using two different PL tones (security codes), all you'll hear is garbled audio at best.
No, but the frequency is still in use, and you won't be able to xmit a useful signal. Some of the fancier toy radios have a 'busy' indicator on the channel readout for this situation. You are supposed to look at it before you key up.
More to the point, CB's used a lower frequency that worked around hills and other obsticals. The modern ones are pretty much line-of-sight with the high frequency they use.
Back in the 70's, a friend of mine in Detroit had a conversation using a standard 5 watt CB one day with a guy in Venezuela. Skip was amazing sometimes.
I know this is an old post... But that's how radios work. Even though there's two different codes, if someone tries to talk to you using say code 7 while someone else is talking on code 8, you'll hear a mix of both. Try it sometime. :)
No! That's confusing it with car gas mileage. It's great when you can take your foot off the gas and coast down hill! Unfortunately like with radio the earth not only curves but at some point you have to come back up the hill!
FMRS and GRS frequencies are allotted by the FCC and the appropriate regulatory authorities in many other countries, for relatively low cost radios operating at a pretty high frequency and very low power. They are not intended, no matter what some advertising may claim, for long distance communication, or broadcasting. That would rather be like claiming that because your car can do 150 mph it is 'possible' to drive at that speed across, say, New York or Pittsburgh in dense traffic!
Proper choice of WTs, application and use are similar to that for any other tool. For example; we have small wire welder. It works fine for what we need; but is not the machine we would choose if building a large steel ship or a bridge!
I can believe that the squelch code from one walkie would open mine, while they were both talking. I was figuring on the other sets taking turns transmitting. Not like they would know, in reality. So, the Radar and Blake doubletalk is very possible.
I really like my FRS walkie talkies. Problem is, I seldom have anyone to talk with.
I have read the specs on some walkies. The ones with AA batteries put out 500 miliwatts, the ones with AAA cells put out 300 miliwatts. So, it's very possible the one set of walkies worked better.
Other thing is antenna height. If she can get on top of a hill (or stand on the car) the range will be farther.
And they further cripple the walkies by mandating a max antenna length of 4 inches. The resonant quarter wave is 6 inches. Like you say, they are low power, short range devices. My longest reach with them has been 0.7 miles.
Yup that was/is phenomenom of the frequencies used for CB Citizen's Band (around 27 megahertz). Very close to the 10 metre (28 to 30 megahertz) Radio Amateur Band). But CB is also relatively low power (about 3 watts). Licensed radio amateurs use variuos output power and modes of transmission. Skip conditions depends on sunspots/solar radiation etc.
My neighbour a trucker, here in Eastern Canada once had an interesting 'contact' with a State Trooper rushing to an emergency in central USA! So under certain conditions very low power can transmit great distances.
Looking up to say the space station with nothing intervening (no hills in space!) very low power would work.
But to get all the radio frequency space or 'channels' needed equipment has gone to higher and higher frequencies. Using frequencies that would have been impossible to achieve, especially for cheap 'consumer electronics' only 50 years ago!
Our 900 megahertz cordless telephone works quite well for a couple of hundred feet; but maybe somewhat affected by the aluminum foil in walls of our house!
We once had a house trailer and despite the high power of the TV transmitter a few miles away, TV would just not work at all inside that metal shell!
You're right, about all of that. CB skip was strange. Radios and TV don't work inside mobile homes. And the freq allocation is getting busier. None of that is good news.
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