(29 July 2012, 16:19)Lightspeed Wrote: Yesterday I tried a little hill topping with teh PMR446.
Managed a 53 Km ( 30 mile) chat with a guy usine simple equipment on another hill.
A station almost 100Km also heard me, but I was not able to chat with him as I was drawing a little more attention than I was comfortable with.
I was using a stock Cobra MT800 by the way.
So distance can be achieved, but you have to climb quite high, as does your recipient.
LS
Good Dxing LS, 30 miles is impressive as a (PMR446) Cobra MT800 Band UHF/FM only gives out 1/2 watt (500mW).
As LS says, he was on a hill top and that's something that PMR446 peppers should be careful about.
Round town, these little radios aren't so good. 3-5 km they say is a typical range but not in real life, not reliably anyway.
The problem is down to the very high frequencies they use and the blocking effects of buildings, trees, vehicles, or even loads of people.
SWMBO and me use PMR 446 when shopping.
All down to me wandering off which drives her
.
(Wonder why us husbands do that??)
In our local town, the shopping centre is only a mile wide yet we can only reliably work the radios a couple of hundred yards.
Luckily for me that means when she goes into Asda (a traditional steel warehouse design) she can't nag me to join her inside.
That's only 300 FEET!
Looking at that performance as a prepper, if you needed to contact someone over any distance during an emergency it can be a little hit or miss. Even if you upped the power it doesn't really help.
There are alternatives though.
At last I've got something good to say about ham handhelds, 2m models work so if you and the wife both get trained, there's no escape for you guys!
Handheld CB's work well too so NR with his Intek 520 wins a prize too.
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