Greetings, I work for a company in the US that does a lot of production work both inside and outside at stadiums and racetracks. We use a couple of different walkie talkies depending of where our show is but they are not great (the only one I remember right now is the Retevis RT21 that I used at my last show which I think is our cheapest radios). My problem is these work fine if we are in the wide open or close but I can not react the other side of the stadium or across the speedway. Do you guys have any recommendations on a good budget radio that will make it across a busy football stadium. I have had used a Motorola XPR6550 provided by the stadium and it worked great but spending over $200 for each radio is not really a viable option for us.
If you swap the retevis for something else, not much will happen. They are 2.5Watt radios and realistically, changing them for 5W radios won’t help that much if the problem is simply being buried in people. I guess that you are finding that if you can see the person with the radio, you can talk to them, but you can’t if they have the radio in a pocket, or they are surrounded by people, metal and other obstacles? Retevis do some nice 8/10W radios, but frankly, the performance is not much better - anjd swapping to different brands doesn’t make any difference really. The usual solution for this kind of thing is a repeater, with an antenna up high in the clear. Not sure where you are, but retevis make a LORA system that makes every radio mesh together with others, so each radio connects to the others they can hear. My experiments with this are that they work really well. If you have 6 they can all work together to make a really solid system. Licencing is country specific so these may not be workable for you.
Being at a stadium or racetrack you should have decent cell coverage, have you looked into something like Rapid Radios using LTE? There are other LTE radios out there other than Rapid Radios but it is a starting point to look into. Also Zello works well using your existing cell phones just download an app for Android or Apple.
I think something like the Motorola DTR700 or DLR110 models with their 900mhz would work well for your use case of needing to penetrate concrete/steel structures. My number here at BTWR is 888-569-9499 ext 245 if you would like to talk over the phone.