Hand Held Radios
Contributors to this thread:Equipment
From: Buyse
22-Oct-14
Can anyone suggest some good hand held radios? I have had a cheap pair for several years and would like to upgrade. Several brands suggest they are good for 20-30 miles but that is simply not true in the mountains. Thanks in advance!
From: boothill
22-Oct-14
We have used the cheap Midlands and Motorola for years. I bought a set of really nice Cobra and tried them. Didn't work any better and now neither one of them work while the cheap ones are working fine. And in the mountains none of them are going to work any better. That 20-30 mile thing is at the top of a mountain with nothing between you and the next radio but air.
From: Buyse
22-Oct-14
I have had Midlands for years and they are still plugging away too. I was just hoping they could have had a little better technology by now. Couldn't agree more with ya about the 30 mile signal. We can put a man on the moon but we can't communicate with our hunting buddy in a valley next to us. HA!
From: Buyse
22-Oct-14
Double post
From: boothill
22-Oct-14
I bought the $100 Cobra's with charging stand and the headsets thinking it would be great. Well it was for about a year then the first radio would transmit and not receive. Now the other radio will receive and key up but not transmit. They told me to throw them away and get new ones, imagine that. Put fresh batteries in my old Midlands last weekend and used them.
From: RK
22-Oct-14
Nothing works really great in the mountains but if you can find old low band they work much better than the high band variety
Even on top of a mountain 20-30 miles is pretty ambitious
We have 25 watt radios that work off of a repeater at the ranch and the most we ever have gotten is about 25 miles. Truck to truck or base to truck. Base to base about 50 miles
Radios are like all gear. Buy the best you can afford. Go to a Motorola radio dealer and do some investigating. Get model numbers etc and then shop Internet for pricing. Used to be some good dealers out of Florida but I cannot remover their name right now.
Check ebay for low band radios
From: boothill
22-Oct-14
Don't see many companies even using business band and repeaters any more in our area with cell phones. My dad was in the business band business with family many years ago. Back when the first mobile phone looked like an old rotary house phone and you called a switchboard operator. I grew up on top of coop elevators and on farms helping put up radio towers and antennas for repeaters.
From: Straight —» Arrow
22-Oct-14
I know a lot of people who swear by the marine band units. I think they are breaking a lot of "radio" laws by using them without a license and in the places they are being used though.
I am pretty happy to get a mile or so out of any unit I have ever owned and that is line of sight.
From: RK
22-Oct-14
SA. You do break some laws with using marine band radios but they do work well. We used them years ago (80's) and they worked really well. Got really good range with them and no other traffic on them. Have them up when we went to a low band system
From: SDHNTR(home)
22-Oct-14
I use them frequently on a ranch I hunt to communicate with friends. We gave up on the FRS frequency handhelds. We finally broke down and bought Motorola CP200's. Great investment.
From: fubar racin
22-Oct-14
The old Motorola VHF radios are about the best I have found, we use our Motorola 800mhz on a simplex channel because that's what we have now but simplex in the hills is pretty much just really expensive walkie talkies
