Fist steps with radio
One of the cell phone companies used to have a series of ads where the tagline was can you hear me now. It was fun because we could all imagine how you end up in such a situation. Well I am now trying something similar. Not with cell phones but with walkie talkies. Three of them arrived yesterday and we do not know how long the batteries will last. We are now doing this simple things. One person drives up and down the road talking at intervals saying can you hear me now. Well I can tell you with a walkie-talkie is that the reception varies constantly. Each time you go around a curve or down a hill things will change. But that has little to do with battery life. Instead we will try to figure out whether or not the batteries under charge last for enough time for us to use the radios while traveling. The kind of thing where one person goes into a mall and talks to the other. This is not military discipline. What I do know is that having a radio can be a lifesaver in certain conditions and it can also be a way to raise your aggravation level two extraordinary points. Am I not hearing the other radio because the battery has gone down or because the person is actually out of range. Something you learn from experience. When I first started playing with radios we did very little point to point work. Usually we had a repeater in the middle and that changes the whole game. If I was more concerned I could get a small repeater going here but that would serve little once we started traveling. So we’ll go with our tests that are far from being scientific but that will give us a baseline for saying whether or not we can go beyond the limit of the property while talking to the other. Just to note our property is not large. For those of you who say why don’t you just get a cell phone the answer is simple have you looked at cell phone charges recently. I am not rich enough for that. I really shouldn’t talk about cell phones because that too, is far from being constant. I live a long way from that tower and if I turn my back the cell phone reception can go away. I no longer want to climb trees. But we shall see or hear. And perhaps by the time summer arrives we will have a system in place that makes sense to us.
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