Family Handyman: I’ve had a life-long fascination with two-way radios. I’ve relied on compact versions while climbing mountains and snowboarding down them, and I’ve also used bulkier pro-grade “walkies” for thousands of hours while working on film sets.
3 comments:
I care a lot about radios and this seems like a good radio, but I don’t see it as being helpful for me. I am an FCC license radio amateur, which gives me access to significantly larger amounts of frequencies and higher power levels for handheld radios. The significant limits of a small radio like the Rocky Talky are its relatively small 5-watt transmit power and the electrically short antenna. My current radio is a 5-watt radio with an 18” ¼ wave dipole antenna. It has the capability to operate on all of the frequencies that the rocky talky can, along with GRMS and HAM frequencies. It also can connect to radio repeaters, giving a very long range. While this radio may not be the right fit for me, it does seem like a very capable FRS radio and would be very useful in a wide variety of circumstances. The extra privileges I have require license fees and extensive testing which most people would not be interested in.
Like Sam, I'm also a licensed Radio Amatuer, which gives me a much larger breadth in talking about radio. I think this product serves a niche (but important) set of radio users, however, I feel like for the kind of people that this is advertised to, they would be better off giving the FCC $35 and getting a GMRS license, which can cover an entire family or group. This kind of license lets you use higher powered radios (5w on most channels .5w on channels 8-14) which can transmit further, not just that, you can go even further by using a repeater channel. I do, however, want to stress that having a good FRS radio in the market is not a bad thing, most FRS radios are barely working when new, and having a manufacturer that cares about quality is a good thing, just because I can transmit on FRS/GMRS with a nicer radio doesn't mean others should have to get a ham radio to have good FRS/GMRS coverage.
Walkie talkies are so interesting to me. I loved playing with walkie talkies as a kid. Me and my sister would go into out back yard each with a walkie talking and played a different version of hide and seek but with walkie talkies. They are also very interesting to me because at my youth theatre we didn;t have a clear com or any other type of com system and instead we relied on walkie talkies which were not reliable and very hard to understand people through but we got the job done. The number of times I ran from the booth to backstage to be able to understand what my backstage crew head was trying to tell me was too many to count. Overall, this was a very interesting article to read about the different qualifications of good walkie talkies. I am so glad that there are better walkie talkies out there now.
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