Motorola long range two-way radios

boing
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Otherwise Roger Ailes would have been in prison years ago.

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Do they even make anything, anymore? (Same as IBM?)

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Please post more.

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A few problems there. The ā€˜22 mileā€™ range is in the GMRS role where the radio is talking to a repeaterā€“a device that simultaniously receives and transmits a signal. In that case the other end of the conversation isnā€™t at 6ā€™, but typically at 50ā€™ (not sure what the limitations for GMRS repeaters are). Additionally, they will likely have a better antenna than the little stub on these handhelds. They likely also have better receive sensitivity and more power on their transmit. Also, I think they play games in that they mean two users using a repeater who are at opposite sides of the repeaters range. So, thatā€™s 11 miles from a user to the repeater and 11 miles over to the second user.

Also, the bald earth approximation isnā€™t anywhere near accurate in real world useage.

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Thatā€™s still disingenuous to say that they are a 22 mile range radio. With a repeater network a person could talk to someone across the planet (IRLP). Not sure if anyone runs IRLP in the GMRS frequencies though, but itā€™s standard practice for 2m (144MHz) and 70cm (440MHz) bands. GMRS is of course ~460MHz, so not too far off the 70cm band.

Note that Iā€™m from Canada so we do have different laws about usage of the radio bands, but at the moment the use of GMRS repeaters in Canada is not allowed:

At this time, the use of GMRS repeaters to further extend the coverage of GMRS communications and devices that exceed 2 watts ERP, will not be permitted.
https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/smt-gst.nsf/eng/sf09104.html

Bald earth is exactly that, an approximation. So yes YMMV drastically in the real world. With obstacles, 500m may be a challenge for the radios. Or radio signals may bounce off other objects and extend distances beyond what would normally be possible. But itā€™s still a good thought experiment to understand radio propagation. There is no doubt that radio propagation is complex, unpredictable, and at many times surprising (both in how good or how bad it can be).

For some of us that live in the bald prairies of Canada. Bald earth is actually a pretty decent approximation.

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Note that the distance of 23 miles likely actually comes from a free-space path calculation, not from repeater usage. Though as you say with a good repeater (high antenna, better receive discriminator, high power transmit) the distance that a radio can be used it quite close to the calculated free-space distance.

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