I got a walkie talkie set as a Christmas present when I was 8. Which was kind of an evil thing to do given I had no siblings or friends to play with. One day I turned one set on and listened for a while and I thought I heard someone talking behind all the static noise. So I said something and was shocked to hear the voice talking back to me. Fast forward a few decades, next week is my wedding and that voice on the other side of the radio is my best man.

Congrats! That's such a cool story!

>Fast forward a few decades, next week is my wedding and that voice on the other side of the radio is...

I think I've seen too many rom-coms because I was sure this sentence going to end with "my fiance." : )

My dad was a HAM (W7AAI) and as a kid I found the frequencies for walkie talkies on his receiver in the shack. After Christmas I would tune in and hear local kids doing the "I can hear you, can you hear me?" thing with the new presents.

my family had a little portable TV (GE 7-7150B, link below) that we'd usually only use down in the basement during severe weather.

one day I learned that you could tune in all sorts of non-TV frequencies. In particular, you could tune into any phone calls my neighbors were making on their wireless phones.

i loved that little tv and used it up until the conversion to digital OTA tranmissions.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4qYPLd8owc

I brought a family-pack of walkie-talkies for my wife and my two teenage boys to use while we were hiking around various Austrian mountains, one summer vacation.

We rarely used them much, since we were often walking in a family unit, so during one of our breaks I took one out, turned it on, and blasted off into the ether "hello hello, anyone out there wanna chat?" .. did this off and on for the afternoon, when suddenly, a voice answered back "yes! who is this?" ..

A family waaaaay the hell down the mountain rage, deep in the valley, had by chance heard my call .. so the boys spent the afternoon getting to know all of the 5 kids in that family that were all drawn to the conversation.

It was awesome, for the rest of the week, our kids and theirs just chatted away .. what had started out to be, a little bit of a mundane trip for the kids, turned out to be a hilarious social experience.

We call for them every time we're out that way - never met them, but for the past 3 years, the conversations have continued and it has been a great alternative to the mobile phones we have been troubled with up in the cabin, at times.

I expected the voice on the other side being your soon-to-be wife. But good story nevertheless. Congrats!

This is awesome, and future congratulations on your wedding!

damn, that's awesome.. I feel like I just watched the opening scene of a nice "stand by me" type movie.

This is awesome, and congratulations!

I got chills reading this. Congrats!

Awesome story and well told