I am looking to get radios for mountaineering where I can talk over a long distance and with mountains in the way!
They will be used in group situations where we may split and have a few miles between us (and be on opposite sides of the mountain). It would also be used while skiing and later this year it will be used while we are climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa.
I really need these to be reliable - I am not happy with the reviews of the Midland GXT1000VP4 as the distance is questionable. Can anyone recommend any?
I’M sorry but I don’t think their is a simple(read that as cheap) answer to your problem.
You need reliability and as I see it the only possible way would be sat phone (I am not even sure that would work in all areas you mentioned) and that would be cost prohibitive (for me anyway).
Maybe some one else has an idea??
For a ski trip those radios would be fine, for a mountain expedition you are going to need much better. According to where you set up a base camp, at least a base station with a mobile antenna and several commercial grade radios. No one here has quite the experience of what you have planned (I think) so I would try to find some people that have done the climb and ask them what they used.
You would also need to carefully research just what you’re ALLOWED to use in a foreign country.
GMRS is USA only.
You might well find the only thing that’s really workable is portable HF stations, or something else… but talk from one side of a mountain to the other is not going to be practical, unless you have a repeater up at the top of said mountain already. Communications may have to be ‘manually’ relayed through multiple stations (careful of the ‘telephone game’ mutation of messages).