Radio Headsets (the ones secret service/security guards use!)?

[Bob_the_lost]

The frequency is 446 MHz - you need to look for things with "PMR446" in the name, ideally. They're low-powered and have a 3km range, max., much lower in built-up areas. You also can't change the aerials on them, they're hardwired (so you can't have a base station with a roof aerial, for example.)

Thank you, incidentally i've got a working CB radio kicking around and it's for sale

Motorola do some great little hand held ones, but i don't know if it's possible to fit them with headsets or not. I've only seen them used as hand held walky talkies.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Cheers guys! You've both been a big help!

 

[KeyboardJockey]

We used the 446 radios at BiCon and they were fantastic. We were getting reilably about 1km range out of them. They reached to all parts of the University of Worcester site. About the only problems we had is we didn't have headsets so if it was noisy we sometimes had to shout twice to the person to get thier response. We had a bit of a problem with the student union building because it was a metal roofed building with a metal frame and we got the occasional drop out when someone was in there with the radio.

We had cheap and cheerful binatone things and they were fine. Sound quality could have been better but it was perfectlyu readable.

What we did was use one channel (3) for general team chit chat and reserved one channel (4) for the first aid and crisis counsellors so that they weren't bothered by all the yakking from the rest of us.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Aha, some experience based feedback, cool! Do you have a link to were you bought em?

 

[KeyboardJockey]

Aha, some experience based feedback, cool! Do you have a link to were you bought em?

We interited them from the BiCon Manchester 2004 team but I'm pretty sure you can get bundles of them in Argos or Maplin. They've come down in price a lot. These ones were very good on batteries we had them on virtually all weekend and they didn't run down. Be aware that you will be sharing the frequencies with other orgs and some hobby users as it is a public acces radio system. We orginially chose channel five for our general chit chat but moved due to non malicious interference from a building site about a mile away. If you have a system where if you get interference everyone moves say from Channel 3 to channel 4 at the same time at a pre arranged signal then you can get round this.

We were a bit worried about malicious interference from bigots who may have been listening in with scanners etc bearing in mind we were running a bisexual event but this worry came to nothing and everything was OK.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

I see, well what ever we get we'll go down and test them at each venue to make sure there's no major interference. But again thank you for the insight, you've been a great help.