How far will this 2mW 27 MHz walkie talkie go?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 เม.ย. 2024
- A range test using the 2mW Great GWR-711 on 27.125 MHz.
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In the early 1970s, 100 mW channel 14 walkie talkies were everywhere. I used to love getting up early on Christmas morning and introducing the new kids to CB radio. I still occasionally hear the "is there anyone out there" on the FRS channels, but the way things are today you'll be in trouble if you answer them.
But there were times, usually in the early summer, when propagation was enhanced and I could hear the milliwatts from about 10 miles away.
Gotta love the code key! The cacophony of about a dozen code keys at the same time is unforgettable!
What trouble would you be in for answering a caller?
Hi, as a kid in the 80's in France, I had a pair of similar 27.125 MHz walkie-talkies. The original telescopic antenna was broken beyond repair on one of them. My dad had some knowledge on radio stuff and he showed me how to make a 2x2.70 m dipole to use the radio as a base station. After I put the antenna between my room window and a tree I could hear voices speaking English! I called them using the little English I had already learnt at school and the guy answered me and told me he was a trucker on a US highway! The propagation was VERY high those years but as a licence Ham radio, I'm still stunned by the QSO today! Too bad I didn't know what a QSL card was 😁
Wait, you could talk to American truckers all the way from France? that's absolutely amazing!
@@coolbluelights yep I didn't realise then but it surely was a QRP record of some sort 🤣
You must have talked to him over that radio when the sunspot cycle was near peak. That is not unusual, but it's usually done with 5 watts. If you contacted that trucker here in the U.S. with that walkie-talkie probably only 10 milliwatts you did great!
@@coolbluelightswhen conditions are just right it’s possible! In 1973, I was sitting in my high school parking lot at lunch time and I had a Radio Shack 6 channel crystal controlled radio which put out only five watts feeding a 36 inch Shakespeare fiberglass top loaded CB antenna which had a very low vswr and talked with a gentleman in Hollywood Florida and I was up in central Ohio. Eighteen years later I earned my Advanced Class Ham License.
@@radiotec76 Yes, the sun activity was probably very high since my neigbors' son also had voices en English from his radio
...with the stock antenna!Since the poor kid was autistic, he was scared to death by the voices from his radio and
spent a whole day hidden in his basement after he broke his radio with a hammer!I don't remember the date for sure
but It was in the early 80's I guess. I can check on a sun cycle chart.Some 10 years later(11.5??) , I was checking
my newly home built 6m station, I wasn't supposed to get on air yet as I didn't have the licence extension for this
band but I checked the SWR on my 3 elts yagi, then TXed a short "test test, Hooolaaaa" to troubleshoot an instability
issue. I was scared of the "French FCC" but who would hear me with 800mW, eh? An a voice answered "QRZ hola hola?
This is VK6AP"! I stopped transmitting immediately! I didn't know if it was the radio agency trying to trick me or a
hoax from fellow HAM but I didn't reply. One month later I read on the radio magazine that the spots were huge, a gigantic 6m opening occurred and some Australian station were contacted from Western Europe, including VK6AP!!! I missed the DX of my life! 🥺
My cousin had a pair of these from new. We did a distance test - unit to unit - from his house that overlooked a park. Checking on google maps we got about 220 metres with the standard antennas. The AM radio section was very respectable for a toy as you have replicated here.
I was seven when my Mum returned from tournee in USA and gave me a pair of 27.125 walkie-talkies. She was asked at customs "what the hell is it?" and replied "it's a toy for my son". In 1966 communistic Poland it was a somewhat unusual toy ;). It was really like magic and I played with it so well, that today I'm still enjoying this magic as a SP5LU ;)
What fun I still have my 1W Sideband Electronics AM Walke Talkie. Best distance was Mt Eliza to Indented Head on ground wave - made my day in 1978 ish…..
OMG! I also had 2 of these when I was a kid. What a classic. Never seen one since. was
late 70's
That General Electric 40ch AM rig you show at about 1:14 was my first 40ch rig back in about 1981/2. It was great, and I'm sure I've still got it somewhere. Must dig it out.
👍Nice. Thanks for video.
In the USA, The CB band used to be the Amateur Radio "11 meter band".....but the Ham radio folks were happy to see it go because it had tons of trouble with Television interference especially with any level of power (amplifiers) was applied. So the ham operators happily sold all their linear amplifiers to the truckers at huge profits (because they were now officially illegal) and left it to the FCC agents to track them all down and confiscate/destroy them all. Meantime, the Ham operators all went out and bought new legal equipment to play with. It was a win-win bonanza for them!
In the early 70s I had in the Netherlands, when CB was still forbidden by law, a Realistic Walkie Talkie very similar to this one output 100 mw. In the street where I lived I only could make contact to 200 meters. The uncle of a friend of me was living on the 16th floor of an apartment building and gave us 11 meters of copper wire and told us to tie it to the antenna and let it hang over the balcony. We could talk to people 10 km away .
I really loved the CB Walkie Talkie, it was real magic. Mine were second hand, i bought them for almost nothing. The only problem was speech could only be recognised within a range of 100 meters and the disturbance caused by it was greater. It was eating batteries and when those were empty the Walkie Talkies stood on a shelve for a few years, went into a box under my bed. And from there I have no recollection of its whereabouts, I used the very distinctive volume knob on a project. It was hours of fun! I have had a very happy childhood.
I put channel 16 (18 channel band) crystals into my DSE Pocket Coms, and got similar range to the home base station with a 5/8 wave Station Master. Great got their super-regen RX design right - it's one of the best for sensitivity.
That walkie talkie was the very first radio i ever had, when i was 6 years old! the one i had was on 27.145.
I guesstimated around 500 or 600m range for that walkie talkie,, so I was close, not bad for a cheap 27 MHz radio.
Always wondered this. As a kid I wish Id known about wavelengths and 1/2 wave antennas! 😁👍
My first walkie talkies as a child were on 27.065MHz and used a super regenerative receiver. The circuitry switched the transistors between tx and rx so that the same transistors were used in the receive and transmit modes ! The range was at most 100m line of sight 🙂 Despite the abysmal performance these walkie talkies triggered my interest in radio comms and CB. I still operate CB across the world using a barefoot FT817
I had one of these! ...So that would've made them available before 1981 ( perhaps 1977?) ... My Dad had a grey-import/illegal 23ch AM Pierce-Simpson, and I (inside the house) could chat with Dad in his car! \o/ thrilled 6 year-old. My Mum (who I found out later had a rather ham-famous high-school teacher) was showing me Morse Code...
I'll never go bak to Ego-Centric-city, arrsseholes one and all.
Might change my mind if all my lent gear was returned.
They took advantage of my disability.
Anyhoo,
great vid, the perfect example of why Amateurs prefer HF.
Good job👍
Hi Peter! Is it really only 2mW?! 😮 I was expecting 20mW or perhaps 200mW or anything that a BF494 or 2N2218 would outout at these frequencies 😂!
Thanks in advance for the video!
These toys typically have only a 1 transistor transmitter, 1 transistor superregen receiver and maybe 3 transistor audio amp/modulator. They might even reuse the tx / rx RF transistor. 2mW is pretty good - some are less than that.
It needs a Yagi or a vertical down by the beach on 27 mhz to explore just what this walkie talkie can do !.
Junk, back in those days, the rolls royce of semi legal was the Lafette MA310 I think, 1 watt hand hald, 3 channels, smelt nice and worked a mile or more especially from the top of Mt. Dandynong. If you had money, you got a Lafette HE20T, 12 channels TX and receive down to what every you wanted including NZ 26 mhz
Those were the days when an Old Pye mark 3a was pushing 15 watts and a very broad band audio that actually sounded very good.
As a young teenager, I quickly learned how to use a grid dip meter, wind coils at 3 times the 75 mhz and getting them working usa dx
If I do it about a yard, if Peter does it probably Brazil lol
Deffo😂
That is a fair range for 2 mW, one time I spoke to someone from Wangaratta Vic, to Rockhampton QLD on a 40 channel 5 watt Tandy unit. but that was under skip conditions and lasted a short time(he had a beam as well). Can you get local radio station 3NE on 1566 kHz, I can pick up 855 from Melbourne during the day and 963?? in Griffith.
Can certainly get 3NE at night. Don't think I can during the day.
Thanks for the video. For the receive end,, were you continuously recording or was it set up to record when triggered by activity or some kind of synch tone?
I used the VOX function in Audacity. Only recorded when the mute was broken.
Hi Peter, Quick question about the circuit for this device. Is the 1m telescopic connected to a slug to peak the output? Would replacing the telescopic with a length of wire increase the range even further, say 2.76m for a quarter wave?
A longer wire may help but matters like impedance matching and radiation pattern will affect performance.
All right I had one when I was younger I can only get a few hundred meters with the standard antenna however when I did increase the height of the antenna there was definitely an increase when it concerns the range of course it is the 11 mph if you're only using 1 M and you're having some small loading coil you will get some signal coming out of it yes very little power and it still comes out V ground propagation most likely you might be able to get more range if you increase as you probably know the height of the antenna you can always try it taking a old TRC 217 antenna and putting it on top of your standard antenna with an antenna adapter you can basically work it to increase the length of the antenna in definitely will increase the range I think I managed to get about almost a mile when you're outside of a city when there is less interferences your signal is going to go on for quite a bit however I think I was transmitting at the time 100 MW this is like 50 times more than what you have however I was still impressed that that little transmitter of 900 MHz you still manage to get some range out of that yes it's a different frequency the power is one thing the type of antenna are you using can make a difference there are guys out there who are doing 10 milliwatts on the ham radio and they can do a 1,600 k I know it's pushing the limits of a small radio like that it's unlikely you would get that range however I think you can get more range out of it just by slightly modifying the antenna and of course being in a different area listen to ference even using saltwater as you probably know saltwater can be good as a radio conductor I did the test with salt water with standard Portables I'm getting about 10 MI on a portable TRC 217 and sometimes I can even get more thank you for the test 73 it reminds me when I was a kid
That picks up 3GG quite well.
Sounds like the radio needs its capacitors replaced. Either that, or a good once over with a soldering iron for cold solder joints.
i read somewhere that 1 watt of rf power has a theoretical range of 1 million kilometres (or was it miles?).
The first Voyager that NASA sent up is now (2024) about 7 billion kilometres away - and those folks at NASA can still hear/control it!
And Voyager is only using 23 watts...on 8GHz...
Maybe consider modifying it for 10m to see on a full sized quarter wave vertical antenna how far it will reach on a two way QSO Peter... Dave G4AKC
I'm a Superbowl 6 mudduck.
Yeah, most of that era were 100 mw. A lot depends on the terrain, conditions, and the receiving station.
@vk3ye >>> Great video...👍
I know a 2mw radio, its great 😂
Creo que los wakys de juguete por lo menos dan una potencia de 20mW no menos como tú dices.
A "2mW" 27Mhz handheld radio will talk about a yard... (3 feet). I think you meant "2W" (as in 2 Watts), rather rather than 2mW (2 Mili-Watts). KN6UG
I meant what I said - 2mW. You are incorrect re what 2mW can do.
Peter Parker?🤔😄