I was looking for a Best Long Range Walkie Talkies 1000 miles
according to a Technicals solution
Admin edit: This is a spam post placed to generate traffic to a tech gadget “review” site consisting of Amazon affiliate links to the products being “reviewed”. There are many of these sites out there that exist primarily to generate affiliate revenue. Most of them are very spammy, poorly written, and loaded with keywords for SEO purposes. The artices themselves are usually technically inaccurate with little actual informative value. In the case of this one, the ridiculous range claim was made solely to serve as click bait and get attention from the search engines. These sites are all about generating Amazon affiliate revenue.
We receive these posts from time to time, and they are subsequently removed. However, I am leaving this one on the site with the link removed as an example of the kind of Amazon affiliate click bait that exists.
I had to laugh - sorry, but that site seems to have some very peculiar reviewers! Why on earth would you think a hand-held radio could cover a 1000 miles? A hand held radio is totally subject to geography and more specifically topography. We always talk about line of site - so most hand held radios being low to the ground, in open countryside might manage 10 miles if you keep the radio up high. If you put the radio in your jacket, the chances of you hearing the ten mile away person call are slim. In urban areas with buildings, range could be half a mile. If you could have a 100W handheld, it really wouldn’t perform much better. Height is the real key to range. If you have cellular phone service at both ends then a handheld IP based radio using a cellular data SIM would remove the distance issue totally. Anywhere in the world with cell signal and the radio works.
Handhelds can get better coverage using repeaters - the ones on mountain tops give excellent coverage of the surrounding valleys - even when the mountain is between the users. Any review where they talk about range should ring warning bells immediately because range is a function of antenna and height predominantly - technical standards, power and frequency band are much less important. HF, VHF and UHF types do perform differently, but not as much as you would imagine. The HF radios - CB, in the main - don’t work that well because the antennas perform poorly - not a huge amount of signal actually gets out, and again, on receive they’re hardly well performing devices. UHF vs VHF differences are a little to do with antennas but I tend to find UHF works better in urban areas and VHF in rural ones. Many would disagree. if you every see a radio being sold with a tag line of miles in the advert, treat it as suspect. 10 mile range I’d find advertisingly acceptable, but the minute they mention 30 mile+ I start to grin, and 1000 miles is just insulting. Years back, I spoke to an astronaut on half a Watt on UHF. I was trying to talk to a friend two miles away, and he couldn’t hear me - but the astronaut did, in Skylab - the US early orbiting space vehicle - and we had a very nice chat. On half a Watt! Practically, even at sea, with no obstacles, the curvature of the earth means that if you can just graze the horizon, then your maximum range will be just under double the distance to the horizon. The horizon is not very far, at sea level, with your radio - the horizon is just over 3 miles, so your maximum range about 6. You can roughly calculate range by distance = the square root of the antenna height in feet. so 9ft high gets you 3miles (a little more actually). An antenna at 16ft gets you 4 miles and 25ft gets you 5 miles and so on - remember it grazes the earth and carries on, so you add in the antenna height the other side of the horizon - so an antenna 16ft high and 25ft high will give you a range of 9 miles. Water is the optimum distance, add a hill or two and the range plummets.
In one review they say “Generally, please make sure batteries are definitely charged and inserted properly before use in a generally big way.” - a good indication an idiot decided on the wording.
Clever click bait. Spammers are getting more focused these days. They cut and paste statements from the same forums they are trying to spam. They also sign on, make a few posts, and then throw in a link, buried somewhere once they are thought to be regular contributing members. But their posts are gibberish; they are usually female-sounding names, and it is just a simple cut-and-paste. We have one here named elizabethx52, and she (he) goes onto old forum posts and “welcomes” people or just cuts-and-pastes from the post above theirs. “Licences are required.”
We get them all the time on other forums I help administer. Clever, and they use social engineering to appeal to people on forums.
A lot of these tactics are not new, you just won’t see them much on forums that are wise to them. We get a fair amount of spam here that is automatically rejected by the system, and what does get through is dealt with once it is discovered. Occasionally I do leave innocuous posts up for awhile because the post itself didn’t break any rules, but I still ban the spammer.
I’ve owned, operated and moderated forums and discussion boards since the classic BBSs of the mid 1980’s, and was an AOL Community Leader in the 90’s. (Yes, I remember Quantumlink too, as I was a Commodore user). The funny thing is, just when you think you’ve seen it all, there’s always something coming out of left field that makes you go “hmm”. It’s a never ending battle of wits with spammers.
LOL. Commodore 64 was too high-end for me. Timex computer. $99, at the local lumber store. (No idea why.) Next was an Atari 128. Then the HUGE jump into a Mac Plus in 1985, one year after the famous Super Bowl commercial. Never looked back. For Christmas that year, I got a 20-pound hard drive with a WHOPPING 20MB of storage, which meant I didn’t need to store the programs and all the files on 800K floppies anymore. (The Atari actually used the TRUE floppies.) This was years before computers had color monitors.
It still irritates my colleagues to no end that the “Mac guy” can fix more problems with Windows than the “Windows” guy.
I’m cross it didn’t even click - maybe I was tired or too dim? Nothing to do with this - but I just spent half an hour thinking Radioddity have changed their decision to not supply the UK - they sent me an email with a ‘special offer’, for a product I used to buy from them, so I thought it worth trying. I put it in the basket and it didn’t say cannot supply to your country - I thought I’d cracked it and they’d had a change of heart. The radio I needed, for $3 more than I paid a month or two ago. Taxes and shipping calculated on the next page. $64 for the radio - yippee, shipping $999.99 and a little message - shipping may be too high, please contact … Fake review sites, and now fake checkout systems.
Yaesu two-way radios are probably the best. BaoFengs are not bad, but you can also look at US-made Midland two way radios. Decent range, updated firmware and good durability.