Taking a Radio Camping

Can anyone recommend something (as in radio type or particular device) for relatively portable battery based comms between two hiking groups? The use case is a big group hike that often gets separated into two or more smaller groups walking at different speeds, but wanting to still be able to check in with each other every so often. There's no cell reception out there.

Basically just want a glorified walkie talkie with a bit more range (a few miles through woods and across hills of possible).

I just got my GMRS license and some cheap 5W handhelds to experiment with, but I'm not sure if that is the best option.

We might also have the option of setting up a "base station" at the trailhead (our cars or someone relaxing at a picnic table) to act as a higher powered repeater if that would help.

How much of it is frequency (radio type), wattage, line of sight, operator skill. etc.?

I'm not very familiar with GMRS, but your scenario is what that license is designed for. So I'd recommend it.

I think in some places you can set up a repeater for GMRS? You'd have to check up with the local regulations.

Of course, you could get everyone (or a few designated people) ham licensed. In many areas, operators are allowed to let other people use their radios under their supervision, so you might not need to even get every single person licensed.

Frequency plays a very big role, and the rest "depend".

There are some frequencies that'd just simply be impossible to use for communication that close (in the grand scheme of things) and others that would struggle to penetrate the trees.

Without knowing the area, I'd guess that 2 or 6 meters would be your best bet. (Probably 2m)

Your next challenge would be getting good antennas. The antenna matters a lot (even more than power output. (See me hitting Australia with 7w))

I'm always available for questions via email. You'll find it in my website.

You might want to check out lora devices like Meshtastic.

https://meshtastic.org/

Thank for you the response! If this GMRS stuff goes well (getting the radios in a few days, hiking the week after that), a HAM license sounds like a fun thing to look at next. But from the movies, it always seemed like that was more of a way to chat with random strangers around the world (like this "Parks on the Air" thing), rather than coordinating hikes between specific individuals. Is that accurate at all?

> Without knowing the area, I'd guess that 2 or 6 meters would be your best bet. (Probably 2m)

What is this in reference to? Is that a measure of wavelength (e.g. 2-6m ~= VHF?) or did I misunderstand? I thought for longer-range comms, you would want to utilize not just repeaters but things like ionosphere reflections and HF. Are you saying that's actually not the best thing to use for wooded areas a few miles apart?

I appreciate the info :) If I really get into this as a hobby, I'd love to hit you up via email. Please give me a few weeks to test the waters first.

This is interesting, thank you! It seems like LoRa operates in the UHF frequencies, and is an encoding scheme for data packets...? Does that encoding system also affect its usable range, or can any two radios in the same frequency generally send/receive over those distances?

A 50kb/s bit rate is fast enough for texting, but I guess it'd take some specialized voice protocols to do a walkie-talkie over that.

Regardless, thank you for sharing.

You can trade range for bandwidth by playing with the spread factor, an encoding tunable: https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/lora/#modem-...

But generally yes, latency is too high and bandwidth is too low for synchronous voice. The upside is that real-world performance often exceeds the range of analog UHF even at significantly lower frequencies, e.g. GMRS.