It's kind of hard to get in on a topic that is 6 months old, but some of the most basic principals here have been forgotten.
First off is the fact that I believe that the reason why the manufacturers advertised that you needed a license to operate these radios was due to the fact that you can purchase over the counter both the bubble pack radios and the base station.
Although in the grand scheme of things 1/2 a watt or even 1 full watt does not seem like a lot of power.
BUT
All signals reduces at the square of the distance.
Just like a flashlight, it only shines so far and then it stops.
When you focus the beam of the light, it shines further, but the width of the beam gets smaller to make it protrude forward.
We can call this forward gain or front to back ratio or what ever we want.
The bottom line is that a 5 watt radio is maybe 150% more powerful then a 1 watt radio.
1 watt is enough power, with the right antenna to transmit at 450 mhz for about 18 miles - clear line of sight.
2 watts would be twice as powerful - but the net gain of two watts would only be maybe another 1 or 2 miles.
4 watts would be twice as powerful as 2 watts - but again for only nominal gains - the looser is the battery pack. Every time you double the power in transmit - you also double the power consumption.
IfTSHTF - you would want to have a radio that would last for more then one day on a battery charge.
Here is a comparison.
My first real radio was a walkie talkie tuned to CB channel 11 is 27.085 Mhz.
With a .500 Mw walkie talkie - you could turn it on in the morning, go hunting all day - maybe two days and transmit 10% of the time and still have a little left in the 1 9 volt battery at the end of two days.
1/2 a watt at 27 Mhz with a 5' long antenna was enough to transmit about 2 miles out in the woods.
My second radio was a Midland 1 watt walkie talkie, it ran on 8 penlight batteries and was 12 volts. It would probably transmit 2 - 3 miles and it had a little more sound to it and it could receive a little better then the cheaper 1/2 watt radio - but at the expense of those 8 pen light batteries.
At the end of two days - you were looking for new batteries because they were dead.
So I moved up to a 5 watt walkie talkie.
With 5 watts - full power, a 5 foot long antenna, you could transmit and receive a maximum range of about 5 miles, but the batteries were drained twice as fast.
So we moved up to a Motorola Talkabout Distance DPS.
It had 7 regular channels, 3 spare channels and a scan feature.
The battery pack was probably 12 volts and it took at least 24 hours to charge it the first time and a additional 12 hours for every charge beyond that for the life of the battery.
It was one watt - with a slightly larger antenna then a bubble pack radio and it would transmit about 2 miles in the woods or maybe about 8 miles on the beach.
When the batteries wore out - they wanted $40 for a new battery and it was relegated to the toy box.
So I bought two radios for about the price of two batteries.
Motorola T 5620 with charging stands for about $80.00
Their antenna was 50% shorter then the Talkabout DPS and their range was significantly less - say maybe less then 2 miles in the woods depending on terrain and maybe 8 miles - clear line of sight.
At the same time - my other brother bought two similar Motorola Walkie Talkies that did not have a rechargeable battery and they were burning up batteries at a rate of about 4 pen light batteries per a day - 10 hours.
So we bought another set of radios that were on sale that also did not come with a rechargeable battery ..
Again - those radios were rated at one watt and they used two pen light batteries and they burned up a set of batteries about every 12 hours.
This radio was a little more efficient then the others - but again at the expense of range.
So my brother and I purchased a new set of Motorola T 7400 radios.
They came with a rechargeable battery, two charging stands and a slightly longer antenna and more channels.
On average we can use them sparingly about a whole week and can go 3 - 4 days without needing a recharge.
Their advertised range - LOS is about 18 miles.
They will transmit about two miles in the woods and about 5 - 10 miles - in the real world - if the transmit and receive had a clear LOS between them.
So basically I spent $800 in 30 years on radios and in the end the only difference between the $100 CB walkie talkie and the $100 GMRS radio is the fact that I don't have to listen to those border blasters in Texas that uses linear amplifiers and beam antenna's and can transmit practically the whole way around the world with 500 watts of power - as long as both the transmit and receive has equally powerful amplifiers and antenna and radio systems.
My GMRS has some traffic - depending on how busy a area I am in and which channel I select.
It always ends up being a fight because one person always thinks that they are smarter then the other and that they have some lucky number that they can use where no one is going to listen to them and they are not going to have to listen to the other people with similar radios.
The worst is always the open channels such as 1-1, 2-1, 3-1 etc.....
The next worst is the double numbers 2-2, 3-3, 4-4, 5-5, 6-6, 7-7 etc...
Then you get into the situation of where one person cannot hear and needs to wear a hearing aid but doesn't have one and so they use the door bell to alert the other person that they would like to talk to them.
The only problem is - with multiple people on the same channel - that are trying to be quiet - such as in a hunting scenario - the one person that cannot hear ruins it for all the others because all you hear on your radio all day is those people ringing each other as if they were in the mall talking on their cell phones.
What is even worse is when you get one person that is higher in elevation then the others and has a better radio then the others and cannot turn down their volume low enough to avoid the noise - yet needs to have the volume turned high enough in case you actually want to hear what those idiots are saying - after all - that is the reason why you bought the radios in the first place.
So it all just ends up being a fight and in the end, you end up carrying two radios. One to talk to your hunting partner - that is on a private channel - that the others are not on and a second radio - that can listen to the other people in the hunting party - that is making all the noise.
It gets to the point of where it gets worse then the CB radio.
Now add to all of this that Iftshtf - there is going to be 1 million other people that has the same idea as you.
The only way those radios would work would be if the cell towers and the phone lines were down and there was no other way of communicating between two people.
Even the GMRS would become so congested in a couple of days that you wouldn't be able to find a open channel.
The HAM radio operator would have more options then the GMRS and could just change bands until they found a frequency with a open band that did not have someone else in the same general area - stepping all over their frequency to try to communicate.
No matter how hard you try - you are always going to have a hard time trying to find an open channel. No matter how many watts etc.
The first time you go into a secluded area with trees or into a downtown city - the range is once again going to be just line of sight because the UHF vs VHF is like sound vs light.
VHF is like sound, when you yell the sound goes in all directions.
It will go up one hill and down the next. It will go around buildings and through buildings depending on the building materials used in the construction of the building.
UHF is like a flashlight, if you shine it up, the light does not come back down unless there is something for it to bounce off of.
If you shine it east, it does not go west. If you shine it north it does not go south. If you shine it at the side of a hill - it does not come out the other side - like a buggs bunny cartoon.
You are very limited in what you can do with UHF communications without a repeater. Even with a repeater - you would need for your radio to be able to be in range with the repeater for it to communicate more then a couple of miles.
Your cell phones transmits in the range of about 869 - 913 mhz.
How many times have you driven down the road where you could see the light blinking on the tower - yet had poor service or no service at all.
Or that the tower dropped your call because it could not make the handshake between towers as you were driving down the road.
The reason why the phones transmit at that frequency was because they did experiments and found that the higher frequencies worked best for digital communications and so they took those frequencies away from the television people and sold them to the phone people for billions of dollars.
Again when television switched from analog to digital - it was not to make it better, but to appease the people who bought those wide screen televisions and wanted high definition reception.
It was once again at the cost of having to sell off the upper frequencies that the television stations occupied. The cell phone and GMRS people paid billions of dollars to the FCC in the way of licenses and fees to get those frequencies.
Once again the FCC messed up because they could have taken away the entire VHF spectrum and moved all television up into the UHF which would have necessitated the use of a UHF antenna on all the OTA reception and would have done away with the VHF antenna's which are larger and a bigger eye sore to some people.
But the VHF is more susceptible to atmosphere noise, ambient noise, along with brush, motor and switch noise - anything electrical interferes with it - just like your old AM radio.
But it takes less power to transmit on the VHF side and less effort to make the signal go the same distance and the transmitter towers were already built - so they allowed it.
At the same time - all of the State Police in my area is part of OPEN SKY - which is a 800 mhz digital format P 25 which cannot be listened to with a regular analog scanner or a scanner that does not have the right codes programmed into them.
The public service - local police, fire, ambulance etc has been moved out of the 155 mhz band and up into the 450 mhz band.
So this would have opened up a whole can of worms had they abandoned the lower ranges and gave those frequencies to the ham radio and public radio people - such as making a band in VHF like the CB which would have alleviated all the radio congestion in the upper bands which caused all these problems in the first place.
The end result is that the FCC is getting ready to get rid of more television frequencies and moving all those stations either to cable networks or to the satellite - because they need the revenue which only the cell phone people can generate - in large gobs.
So everything we take for granted right now - will soon be a pay as you go option for most people and the people who lives too far off the grid - are going to be SOL!
When this happens - and you people talk about the WTSHTF - all a foreign country or militant group would have to do is attack the satellites and the land line communications and create some kind of electrical pulse that would wipe out most of the electronics communications capacity of the country and within a day the whole country would go dark.
After that - you wouldn't have to invade it.
The people would up-rise and would fight amongst themselves and the whole country would look like one big apocalypse.
These people who are so dependent on communications to live their lives wouldn't know what to do with themselves once the cell phones had no service. They couldn't even call the phone company to get it fixed.
How stupid are they ?
Then the people with the most efficient means of communications will be the ones with the Ham and CB radios and not the GMRS or other line of sight modes of communications.
![[laugh]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/012.gif "Laugh [laugh]")
OR ELSE! Unless their "fetish" about their overpriced intellectual property has changed, I wouldn't touch commercial motos for this reason alone. They do make a killer radio though. On the other hand I could be misinformed and there might be some guy making GNU/GPL/freeware to program the things, or Moto could have backed off. 
![[shocked]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/007.gif "Shocked [shocked]")
