Walkie talkies are toys of limited power. What you want is a pair of programmable radios from China, complete with zero day exploits in the software that infect your PC.
Baofengs? They’re illegal to operate unless you have a HAM licence for 2 meters.
Baofengs?
Exactly lol.
They’re illegal to operate unless you have a HAM licence for 2 meters.
Indeed, but a license is fairly cheap.
The Technician test isn’t too hard either.
Or get the Baofeng gmrs/frs radios. Cheap license no test.
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As long as you don’t transmit you’re fine, so you can use them as a scanner without a care in the world (although baofengs kind of suck at scanning because they’re so slow). I wouldn’t want to transmit unlicensed, though. You’d be risking some pretty serious fines, especially if you don’t know which bands are safe to transmit on… and if you are going to learn what bands are safe to transmit on you might as well just get a license because it’s not that much harder, and it’s kind of fun. Then you’ll have a lot of permissions and can mess around as much as you want :).
Man, remember that brief period of time where some people had those cell phones that had a walkie-talkie-like function. You’d be having a conversation with these people and their phone would do this weird blip noise and they’d say “Hold on,” and pull out their phone and “yeah, what’s up?” And then there would be some unintelligible gibberish and they would say “hang on, I’m inside” and then just go walk out the front door.
Nextel. My uncle worked in construction and had one. Chirp chirp.
Yeah, that’s the one. Back when we had the iPhone 1, blackberries, razrs, and the undefeatable Nokias that kids were trying to break so they could get an iPhone.
PTT, push to talk. There are applications like that now and I guess teens are using WhatsApp and other chat applications in similar way without knowing it by sending audio messages.
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It’s an app with a button that records a message and sends it to the other walkie talkie app of the person you’re trying to reach.
My wife and I use it fairly regularly for updates when we’re apart. It’s quite handy since it’s nearly immediate, and you can get a response back quickly.
It’s just as fast as a text lmao
Text messages can be missed though, the walkie talkie function beeps and then just plays its message. It’s slightly more direct.
I feel like it’s easier to miss a one time notification than a text that leaves a notification until you read the message.
I mean there’s a reason those phones died out lol.
Maybe, but the walkie talkie app only works on the Apple Watch, and if you’re not wearing it the function doesn’t work. They will get a notification you are unavailable.
Like this, it’s pretty impossible to miss your partners voice coming through your wrist. Then you can just quickly lift and tap and hold to respond back.
I’m not going to argue if it’s faster or better or whatever, only that it’s pretty convenient to have the option, and it’s always nice to hear my wife’s voice instead of a sterile txt.
Radios got their own weird gatekeepers and turf wars too, you got no idea. Try Ham vs GMRS as an appetizer
Are you saying that they might look down on my incredible hulk walkie talkie?
Depends on which crowd you catch haha. The GMRS guys are usually pretty cool. The hams have some really sour apples mixed in.
Ham operators-- ready the pitchforks!!
Do all your weird callsigns and then try to kick off the usual loud redneck troll with an insane setup in bumfuck Wisconsin first, then spend 5 hours trying to coordinate with irregular replies with long periods of silence
first chad forgot to say ‘over’
Forgot to say what? ‘over’
over, over
Over what? over.
over!
Are you over? over
over where? over
He forgot to say ‘over’, ‘over’
I’d just like to say
So, nothing, then?
You’re breaking up? What’s that? Can you move closer to me or get up on a hill? Over.
Curious: Is there some decentralized version of mobile phones? Like a mesh network for communication over walkie talkies. Your walkie talkie would help extend the range of nearby walkie talkies and route communication between them.
You can make one yourself, see Meshtastic.
It wouldn’t work over long range though unless it had a lot of users.
Aren’t mobile phones just radios that communicate with towers? Could a smartphone app accomplish this?
Yeah but if you are using towers it isn’t decentralized.
I mean instead of using the radios to communicate with towers, use them to communicate with each other. Don’t know if the phone’s cellular radio could be used but certainly WiFi direct would work?
You can but signals can only go so far and the earth is round so you need a mesh network with a lot of users to make it work.
Yup. People in rural areas could probably set up powerful radios to connect cities. Crossing oceans might be a problem.
Found an app called Briar that does this sort of thing for messaging.
There are apps to do this using Bluetooth, but no audio iirc. They were used in Hong Kong. I have no sources because I read it on the internet a few years ago, lol
That’s exactly what I was envisioning, thank you! I wonder if radios in smartphones (cellular module or wifi direct) could be leveraged to do the same in densely populated areas. Could there be a meshtastic app for phones? Free, decentralized mobile phone calls.
Seems like there is an app called Briar that does this for messaging. Not sure if it does voice calls.
I doubt that Bluetooth and wifi antennas on phones are going to be great at long distances. Text is going to be a much better bet as it needs less bandwidth and doesn’t have to be received in real time (so you can store and remit messages later).
That makes sense. I saw another mesh app that lets you transmit voice messages, so it’s not real time.
Did you find Meshenger yet? It’s not exactly what you’re after as it still relies on a local wifi network for comms, but it’s one of the closer apps I’ve found to what you describe.
That said, what’s the app you found that lets you transmit asynchronous voice messages? Sounds kinda cool!
Ah cool! The app I found is White Mouse, but it says it’s limited to a 100 meter radius so I wonder if it’s truly mesh.
Honestly if you’re interested in this stuff I’d encourage you to get a radio license. You’d probably be interested in repeaters, satellites, and HF, but you might also be really interested in stuff like APRS (which is sort of a giant radio mesh net). I don’t know what country you’re in, but usually licenses are really cheap and just require you to pass a relatively easy (with some studying) multiple choice exam. The hardest part is usually just figuring out where you can take a test (at least in the USA tests are run by volunteers, so you have to do a little bit of searching to see when they do them in your area).
This project is similar to that (and sibling projects such as nomad network and sideband)
Edit: forgot the link! https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum
Which project?
I’ve added the url, thanks
I know people in Cuba used to have a decentralized Internet mesh network, but I don’t know about mobile phones. There have probably been some large crime groups who have made their own networks.
RIP Firefox phone
Smoke signals and pigeons.
Fuck phones.
Sent from my Idroid
3D printed carrier pigeons
A handwritten poem on luxurious high-grain French paper, adhered to a catapult boulder, flung at thine enemy’s wall.
Pigeons aren’t real
Ham radio never completely died, just got a bit quieter, but it’s still a thing
And unless you’re using some encrypted digital modes, I can also listen to your conversation, and imagine being a part of it.
Technically, I could do it with phone calls over GSM if the weak A5/1 encryption is used, and I had 1TB of storage for rainbow tables, but that’s fairly illegal.
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for some things its more like:
degoogled (graphene, calyx, etc) >>> iphone > googled android
With correct timing “Can I get a 10-9 on that, over.” can be the funniest shit you’ve ever said on the radio.
I just looked up the ten-codes to find out what that meant and was dismayed to discover that “10-15” isn’t code for a hostage situation. “Cops and Robbersons” lied to me.
Talkie-walkie in French. Guess who copied the homework.
PTT coming back is still a wishlist item for most tech people over 35.
I want to get into ham radio, but the test practice material was way way over my head.
