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Originally Posted by nyalpine90
I came across 20,30s and 50 mile range.
I did read comments of needing license for owning certain radios.
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Those are all FRS/GMRS radios, and the numbers are essentially meaningless beyond a projection of range between two line-of-sight mountain tops under ideal RF conditions with nothing between then. On anything less than level ground, you'd be lucky to get two miles on a good day. Indeed, Motorola's range estimates are UP TO 6 miles on open water, and UP TO two miles in a typical neighborhood. Why do you think that truck drivers continue to endure the squeals and static of CB radio and not change over to FRS/GMRS FM radios?
We used FRS/GMRS radios at our Nassau Coliseum autocross events when I was running the program, and sometimes had to change channels and privacy codes to avoid chatter from fans when Hofstra University was having home sports events across the street. When SHTF, there will probably be no free channels available when everyone pulls their shopping mall/cruise ship/ski area/hiking/camping radios out of the closet and starts jabbering with no coordination or net control. Despite what the ads say about gazillions of private channels, there are only 23 radio frequencies between FRS and GMRS shared between all of the radios in an area.
I still have two top-of-the-line Motorola waterproof and repeater-capable radios in my race car hauler, if anyone is in the area and wants to try them out on a hike in the woods.
FYI, you can operate them on the FRS channels without a license, but must write the check for a GMRS license to use the higher-power options on GMRS channels the last time I checked. Not that anyone does get the license, since 99% of the buyers don't know what is legal on each of the different channel numbers.
Like I said, if you want *reliable* radio communications in an emergency situation, get the ham radio license and volunteer for those emergency service groups. There are 173 VHF/UHF ham radio repeaters claiming to have emergency power supplies on hilltops all over New York State according to RepeaterBook, each with 10+ miles of coverage with a ham radio walkie talkie and 50+ mile range to a car-mounted or home base station radio. Some of these repeaters are located at and sponsored by county emergency centers, and even networked together (by radio links) to cover large regions. There are prepper resources on the web with details, since it is something that they plan to use when SHTF.....