Mr. Rawles:
My friends and I have been using the MURS band for some time. It generally has better range than FRS/GMRS and is much less crowded. There is an interesting product available that works with these radios as a sort of “perimeter alarm” system. The MURS Alert from Dakota Alert is a small, weatherproof box that combines a PIR motion detector with a 1-watt MURS transmitter and a voice module. It uses six size AA batteries and has an advertised six month battery life. The unit is placed near a road, driveway, trail, etc and set up. When a vehicle or person moves past it, the unit broadcasts a computerized voice that says “Alert: Zone One, Alert Zone One.” The unit can be configured to broadcast four different alerts, and supports the five MURS channels and all PL tones. We have field tested it, using it to stake out the road about 1/2 mile from our camp site, and the system worked as advertised. I have also used it as a car alarm. You can place the MURS alert on your front seat, and carry a MURS-band walkie-talkie with you. If the car is broken into, you will get an alert and it is unlikely to be disabled before sending it. One caution: the plastic case can get deformed if you leave it in a very hot car in the summer.
The unit is marketed towards people in rural areas with long driveways, deer hunters who want to keep an eye on their trails, et cetera, but the [retreat] security applications are obvious. The only drawback I see is cost (around $100 for a single unit) and the fact that animals/etc may cause false alarms. Detection range is advertised as up to 80 feet, and I can verify that it does cover a standard two-lane road reasonably well. Regards, – Arclight
[I asked our advertiser, MURS Radios, if these motion detector were compatible with their MURS handheld transceivers, and the following was their reply;]
Jim,
Yes,our $49 Kenwood MURS Radios are compatible with the MURS Alert systems. The MURS Alert can be set to any one of the five MURS frequencies and any one of the 38 CTCSS tones (they call them subchannels.) The radios I sell can be easily programmed by the user to match the settings on the MURS Alert and can be used as the receiver for these units. A nice feature of this system coupled with MURS transceivers is that you can have two-way comms and an alarm notification on the same radio and on the same working frequency.