I need something for the high desert (mountain terrain) and I was considering a couple of Motorola XTN XV2100’s.
The thing is sometimes I hunt alone so I would also like to be able to contact other party’s with other radios. Also rangers and weather if possible.
Any suggestions?
The Motorola XV2100 supports 27 different frequencies, including MURS frequencies which do not require a license. It would be a good radio for your terrain, but is not likely to work well for contacting others and it doesn’t support weather channels.
If you went with the Motorola AXV5100 we could program one of the channels to receive weather broadcasts from a local NOAA tower, we could also drop the power to two watts (max is four) and program up to 5 of the channels for MURS so you could still avoid licensing.
This would solve your weather issue, but may or may not help as far as contacting others. If you are looking to contact other random individuals that may be in the area, most likely they will be on GMRS or MURS, with GMRS being more common. Neither of the radios mentioned here support GMRS, but you would be able to contact anyone else using MURS assuming they were not using a privacy code. As far as a ranger, do you know what frequencies they are using?
Danny