Mr. Rawles:
We would like to purchase a weather band radio, plus several walkie-talkies. We want radios that don’t need a license, for use around our house and around town, as well as for up at our cabin in the U.P. [Upper Peninsula] of Michigan, which we are stocking for a retreat. (My husband is a part-time building contractor. Last summer, we made a fairly narrow windowless utility room in the cabin “vanish” by removing its door and molding and sheetrocking it. The only entrance to the room is now via a secret door at the end of a paneled closet in an adjoining bedroom.) We have some low power [500 Milliwatt] walkie-talkies, but they don’t have the power to talk between our [Ford 4WD [1]] Excursion and our Winnebago RV [2] when we “convoy” on our trips to Michigan. What do you recommend? What band is best for walkie talkies? CB [3]? MURS [4]? Is MURS in the same band as a weather radio? Thank you for your time. – Alice in Akron
JWR Replies: Unless you want to go to the trouble of getting license, where 2 Meter [5] band and GMRS [6] have advantages, my advice is to get several MURS band hand-held radios. The MURS band is near the NOAA [7] weather band, but in different allocated frequencies. NOAA weather alert radio stations all broadcast in a set-aside small band allocation from 162.400 to 162.550 MHz. Local frequencies can be found at a NOAA web page [8]. Most police scanners, MURS radios, and 2 Meter Band radios can receive in the NOAA “WX [9]” band. Dedicated WX band receive-only radios are available from Radio Shack for less than $30. As you might expect, broadcasting by anyone other than NOAA in this band restricted. Most MURS hand-held have four times the power of your current walkie-talkies. BTW, if you can order one or more MURS hand-held transceivers from $49 MURS Radios [10], they can program your local NOAA frequency (in receive-only mode) upon request. BTW, they can also program them to use a Dakota Alert [11] “driveway alarm” intrusion detection system frequency. (These also use the MURS band.) That is exactly what they did for us, for the three MURS hand-helds that we recently bought to use here at the Rawles Ranch [12]. BTW, I recently found a link to a useful FAQ on MURS [13]. Among other things, the FAQ [14] describes some of the advantages of MURS over FRS [15] and 27 MHz CB, and spells out the FCC [16] limitations on MURS external antennas, which are thankfully quite generous.