In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

My grandparents - sometime in the '80s - had an early-model cordless phone. It was a lovely object: the ivory-colored plastic handset was a smooth curve, with no sharp edges. Being able to talk on the phone from the backyard was magic! It had just enough range that my grandmother could carry on a conversation throughout her daily circumnavigation of the house to turn on the sprinklers.

Sometime after they got it, so did their next-door neighbors (not necessarily the same model: they weren't - irony! - on speaking terms), and then sometimes you'd pick up the handset and find yourself eavesdropping on both sides of the neighbor's phone call. Fortunately, the manufacturer had anticipated this: there was a three-position frequency-selection switch on the side. (I can't remember if the base station hopped to whatever you set on the handset, or if you had to set it manually on the base, too.) That worked fine for a while, we used frequency #2, the neighbors used... one of the others, until (I assume - we never heard anyone else's calls) a further-away neighbor or two also got a cordless phone, and the next-door folks had to frequency hop.

They put up with that for a while, and then sadly reverted to corded phones until more-advanced cordless tech became available.