[eternityforest]

What about Meshtastic and CB? CB is kind of awful but it's cheap, and Meshtastic is text only but has amazing range.

I still can't believe any of this is even an issue though.

There's no technical reason we couldn't have cheap all digital bubble pack radios with miles of range and mesh support, running deep learning codecs on an ASIC or something....

Every time I'm on a project that needs radios it's an expensive hassle that seems like it should have been solved by now.

[solardev]

CB doesn't seem to solve anything that FRS (walkie talkies) or GMRS (nicer walkie talkies with call signs) doesn't already do better. Meshtastic is interesting but not for the use case of general use between family members (no way I want to build and support DIY hardware like that just to use as walkie talkies... GMRS radios are complicated enough already for the average non techie user).

It's so bizarre coming into the radio world from the tech/web/network protocols world. On one hand everything is so nicely defined and regulated and licensed and shared. On the other hand all the UX seems 20 years in the past.

I'm excited about things like DMR and handheld to handheld texting, but that's a harder license to get and there's only one expensive handheld that actually supports the texting, I think...

[eternityforest]

There's starting to be off the shelf Meshtastic hardware, otherwise I'd agree.

Actually using custom hardware or soft is not something I consider a reasonable choice, basically ever, unless there's no off the shelf alternative, or I'm specifically being paid to create said off the shelf alternative.

CB has a bit better range but otherwise I'd mostly agree.

In practice FRS is the only thing I ever actually use besides checking in at the weekly net with a Baofeng, it's just the standard everywhere, even for small scale commerical stuff, and it's what everyone I know already has.