How to ensure you buy legally compliant radio equipment

The march of progress has made buying and using two-way radios easier. However, as Piers Bedford and Sam Fenwick discover, there’s still much that buyers need to know to ensure they are purchasing safe and legally compliant equipment

We are all used to picking up our mobile phones and effortlessly calling a friend or colleague almost anywhere in the world.

We then wonder why our handheld radio, at least twice as bulky, often struggles to communicate more than a couple of miles. Range is always high on our wish list... followed by reliability, battery life, build quality, additional safety features, functionality and so on. The reason our mobile phones, the emergency services, and some businesses get such good coverage is because they have local repeaters that receive the weak signal, boost it and then retransmit it, usually using a tall aerial mast.

With a huge choice of radios available, all with different features and ranging from very cheap to expensive, choosing the right radio needs careful thought.

Claims are repeatedly made for radios that have ‘greater range’ than others. The reality is that all radios have a legal maximum output power and so most devices all have the same range. The maximum output power of handhelds is five watts for VHF, four watts for UHF, and in the case of PMR 446 only 500 milliwatts. Most base stations and in-vehicle installations cannot exceed 25 watts.