Walkie Talkies

We finally decided that we had enough of donating paying IDA about $400 or so a year for a restricted license required by our extremely old walkie talkies at work. The walkie talkies we had were really very old and the batteries couldn’t hold a charge for any reasonable amount of time anymore. We figured that $400 could easily buy us a few sets of brand new walkie talkies. We’ve seen some that were really cheap.

You could get a pair of Motorola walkie talkies for as little as $60 or so. But there’s a range of higher-end models. Not everyone is IDA approved though. We were browsing through the selection and finally decided to get this Talkabout T5603R. It’s going for $148 at Courts and HomeFix.

There’s actually another brand with very similar specs that sells for a few ten dollars less, but a key difference is that the Talkabout T5603R comes with rechargeable batteries that can be replaced with normal AA-sized batteries. That other model used a proprietary rechargeable batteries that cannot be swapped out with standard batteries. I figured the option to swap out with standard AA-sized batteries is important, because in all likelihood, the batteries will die even though the radio set is otherwise still in good condition. More than once we’ve been bitten by spoilt batteries that rendered our battery-powered gadget useless.

The T5603R is IDA approved and claims 5km range under ideal conditions. That’s plenty far from what we used to get with the toy walkie talkies we used to play with as little kids. But of course, this is the rated specifications, I’ve no idea what the real-world range actually is.