page_title: Walkie-talkie
section_title: Personal use
hierarchical_section_title: Walkie-talkie / Contemporary use / Personal use
caption_attribution_description: English: This image is a picture of a Motorola Talkabout T5400 FRS two-way radio, manufacture date 8/2002. The picture is annotated to show all the basic parts on a typical personal walkie-talkie device; while this model is no longer made, most Motorola Talkabout radios have a similar control layout, and accept the same accessories. The picture was taken on a Nokia cellular phone and edited using AppleWorks 6.
context_page_description: A walkie-talkie, more formally known as a handheld transceiver, is a hand-held, portable, two-way radio transceiver. Its development during the Second World War has been variously credited to Donald Hings, radio engineer Alfred J. Gross, Henryk Magnuski and engineering teams at Motorola. First used for infantry, similar designs were created for field artillery and tank units, and after the war, walkie-talkies spread to public safety and eventually commercial and jobsite work.
  Typical walkie-talkies resemble a telephone handset, with a speaker built into one end and a microphone in the other and an antenna mounted on the top of the unit. They are held up to the face to talk. A walkie-talkie is a half-duplex communication device. Multiple walkie-talkies use a single radio channel, and only one radio on the channel can transmit at a time, although any number can listen. The transceiver is normally in receive mode; when the user wants to talk they must press a "push-to-talk" button that turns off the receiver and turns on the transmitter. Smaller versions of this device are also very popular among young children.
context_section_description: The personal walkie-talkie has become popular also because of the U.S. Family Radio Service (FRS) and similar licence-free services (such as Europe's PMR446 and Australia's UHF CB) in other countries. While FRS walkie-talkies are also sometimes used as toys because mass-production makes them low cost, they have proper superheterodyne receivers and are a useful communication tool for both business and personal use. The boom in licence-free transceivers has, however, been a source of frustration to users of licensed services that are sometimes interfered with. For example, FRS and GMRS overlap in the United States, resulting in substantial pirate use of the GMRS frequencies. Use of the GMRS frequencies (USA) requires a license; however most users either disregard this requirement or are unaware. Canada reallocated frequencies for licence-free use due to heavy interference from US GMRS users. The European PMR446 channels fall in the middle of a United States UHF amateur allocation, and the US FRS channels interfere with public safety communications in the United Kingdom. Designs for personal walkie-talkies are in any case tightly regulated, generally requiring non-removable antennas (with a few exceptions such as CB radio and the United States MURS allocation) and forbidding modified radios.
  Most personal walkie-talkies sold are designed to operate in UHF allocations, and are designed to be very compact, with buttons for changing channels and other settings on the face of the radio and a short, fixed antenna. Most such units are made of heavy, often brightly colored plastic, though some more expensive units have ruggedized metal or plastic cases. Commercial-grade radios are often designed to be used on allocations such as GMRS or MURS (the latter of which has had very little readily available purpose-built equipment). In addition, CB walkie-talkies are available, but less popular due to the propagation characteristics of the 27 MHz band and the general bulkiness of the gear involved.
  Personal walkie-talkies are generally designed to give easy access to all available channels (and, if supplied, squelch codes) within the device's specified allocation.
  Personal two-way radios are also sometimes combined with other electronic devices; Garmin's Rino series combine a GPS receiver in the same package as an FRS/GMRS walkie-talkie (allowing Rino users to transmit digital location data to each other) Some personal radios also include receivers for AM and FM broadcast radio and, where applicable, NOAA Weather Radio and similar systems broadcasting on the same frequencies. Some designs also allow the sending of text messages and pictures between similarly equipped units.
  While jobsite and government radios are often rated in power output, consumer radios are frequently and controversially rated in mile or kilometer ratings. Because of the line of sight propagation of UHF signals, experienced users consider such ratings to be wildly exaggerated, and some manufacturers have begun printing range ratings on the package based on terrain as opposed to simple power output.
  While the bulk of personal walkie-talkie traffic is in the 27 MHz and 400-500 MHz area of the UHF spectrum, there are some units that use the "Part 15" 49 MHz band (shared with cordless phones, baby monitors, and similar devices) as well as the "Part 15" 900 MHz band; in the US at least, units in these bands do not require licenses as long as they adhere to FCC Part 15 power output rules. A company called TriSquare is, as of July 2007, marketing a series of walkie-talkies in the United States, based on frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology operating in this frequency range under the name eXRS (eXtreme Radio Service—despite the name, a proprietary design, not an official allocation of the US FCC).  The spread-spectrum scheme used in eXRS radios allows up to 10 billion virtual "channels" and ensures private communications between two or more units.
caption: A Motorola FRS radio
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