CB Vs Walkie Talkie

[dieselboy]

Is this the new thing to have instead of CB's now?

[Apache]

Not really, just CB is the 'old' thing

A lot of people use PMR now as they're more available than CB, for better prices, and you dont need comms over 10 miles or so on an offroading trip do you?

If you do (for expeditions etc), there's always VHF around 170MHz, which combined with a decent antenna will p1ss all over CB for reliability of communication.

[Tallyman]

You're unlikely to get anything that would use CB & PMR frequencies in the same handset. CB uses 27Mh, PMR uses 446Mh.

CB is allowed greater power, so has greater range. A good set up, car mounted, could be heard over 25 miles away or more if the conditions are right. In the old days, stuck on top of a hill in Wales, I got an 80 mile contact with a guy in Swansea using a small handheld CB (height is everything!!).

I've got a couple of sets of PMR radios which we use for team comms playing Airsoft. The Binatones (similar but not the same as those shown above) look and feel better made but seem to have poor range, being only any good for about 1/2 mile in built up areas. My Cobra 600's are not quite as easy to use but the sound quality and range are better, but they were about twice the price.

The more you pay, the better the quality, but you still only get 8 basic channels with PMR. All the "additional" channels are just tone settings of the basic channels, where if you use the sub channel codes you can only hear someone using the same code. However, anyone with a basic set (no codes) can still hear you on the base channel , you just can't hear them.