I need some new handheld radios and I don't want to spend lots of money. Just a couple of miles range would be fine, durable would be good. What should I get and where? Thank you.
Politics & Religion!
Radio waves are controlled by a government agency (FCC) and therefore this thread should be P&R 😉
Politics & Religion!
Don't tell Wendell, please. I'll be good from now on.
Politics & Religion!
:-O
I better start a Political Walkie-Talkies category.
Motorola CP200
I bought a pair of Motorola CP200 handhelds about a year ago. They cost me about $240 each, and are more compact than the SP-50 models I was using before. I haven't tested them for range, but they seem to do about as well as the SP-50s.
That's another way of saying that you probably won't get a couple of miles out of them, unless you have line of sight and hold them up at face level. We generally carry them in our back pockets and use clip-on mikes, so our bodies are absorbing a lot of the RF energy. Under those conditions, a half mile is about as far as you go, which is fine for most of my work.
Jim
Thanks for the actual adult reply. I've got some cheap Motorola Spirit MV11C's that I got at Sam's Club for about $50 apiece several years ago that will do a mile with line of sight easily. I've got a crew working some mountainous terrain in Nevada where the radios don't work if one guy's over a hill from the other guy. We've got four of them and I carry one, they carry one each and then they've been carrying these old orange Motorolas that I don't know the model number of that work better but they're falling apart.
The first thing out of their mouths when they fell out of the truck this afternoon was "We need new radios". The job is frustrating enough without struggling for reliable communication. The other frustration is that the last time we sent in the FC-100 data collector for service, they talked us into the software upgrade and apparently it's like a lot of other upgrades, it sucks.
