I thought about acquiring a pair of walkie-talkies for use during our Euro Tour to France and Spain in July. The tour is going to be fairly free-form once we get to a town of interest, we would be encouraged to wander around. However, because the schedule is tight, it would be good if we could arm our team with modern communication and navigation technologies.
Easy communication would be a great technology to have. GSM roaming is supposed to be great and in fact works fine in China. However, a few years back when I was in the U.K. calls from local friends to my GSM phone number in Hong Kong were awful. Reception could be excellent, yet voice quality was so bad it just wasn’t very useful. Calling them back didn’t help much. The best thing to do was to call them back on a public phone or a land line. Not to mention to extortioate roaming charges. This is not the solution.
A couple or three walkie-talkies would be ideal. We’ll be visiting mostly towns and small cities and once we reach our destinations we’ll be exploring the place on foot and well within the range of walkie-talkies.
James like any good geek was quick to jump to good recommendation of a Motorola walkie-talkie. However, it appears that unlicensed walkie-talkies for use in Hong Kong use a totally different freqency range than the equivalent equipment in Europe, i.e. it is probably illegal to use the walkie-talkies acquired in Hong Kong in Europe.