It's criminal that cell phones are bristling with incredibly advanced radio technology and yet they are by law not allowed to communicate directly with each other over a distance of more than a couple hundred meters without assistance from a licensed and centrally controlled base station. Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is not allowed to be used for data transmission. This is a choice our governments have made, not something inherent to the technology.

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squarefoot an hour ago | parent | next [-]

A small USB pluggable module that supports LoRa plus an app using Codec2 or similar low rate codec for voice encoding could fill the gap, although having it bundled with the phone would make it a lot less cumbersome to use. For non phone portable solutions, the LilyGo T-Deck Plus/Pro come to mind, but they're not phones so that would imply a 2nd device to carry around.

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lxgr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is not allowed to be used for data transmission.

Is this even true?

I still have two Gotennas from before they pivoted to military use cases, and they were legal to use both in the US and in Europe (on different bands auto-configured via GPS, as far as I remember).

REI also currently stocks at least one set of walkie talkies [1] that can relay short messages from smartphones via Bluetooth.

[1] https://www.rei.com/product/240874/motorola-talkabout-t803-2...

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modeless an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Wow, you're right, data is technically allowed on FRS frequencies. I didn't realize that. It's not unrestricted though. There are a lot of regulations that constrain how FRS radios can work, much more than for 2.4 Ghz.

	▲	lxgr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There's also a slice of ISM spectrum available around 900-930 MHz in the US, and Europe has an equivalent one around 860 MHz, which is where the (unfortunately discontinued) Gotenna consumer device used to operate.

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oldgregg 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Get bought out by military control grid --> Instantly kill popular consumer devices.

	▲	lxgr 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Happened to my Iridium satellite messenger (for peace of mind when hiking) too... Fortunately, there are several consumer/civilian alternatives to these. I guess anything that's useful to regular hikers is potentially also useful to the armed, abroad type of hiker, and these are usually better funded, so I can see why startups like these would pivot.

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digiown an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Will the walkie talkies work if there are hundreds in a small area all transmitting data with each other? Besides, there's just not that much bandwidth there.

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rm30 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The smartphone is just an advanced walkie-talkie, currently limited only by the mobile operator, the law, the radio chipset, and the OS.

In a true emergency, who can stop you from modifying that architecture? Once you treat the device as an independent radio node (using its DSP power to run custom modems) you can establish a mesh network with a range of several kilometers.

We have a '4x4 car in our pockets; we’ve just been conditioned to treat it like a toy.

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modeless an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Walkie talkies as licensed today wouldn't because they are required by law to use exclusively stone-age radio technology. But modern unlicensed radio technology is incredibly good at sharing scarce 2.4 Ghz spectrum. Sometimes devices do interfere with each other, but they remain useful and they are far better at sharing than any expert would have predicted years ago. Let the radio engineers try.

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kanbankaren an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It is not as easy as you think.

RF attenuation is proportional to frequency and at 2.4 GHz, it is very high. Also, the distance over which one could communicate depends on antenna height, so if both parties are at ground level, it is not feasible over a few hundred meters unless both are in wide open space.

Source: ham operator who has played with long distance device to device communication without using a repeater.

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lxgr an hour ago | parent [-]

> RF attenuation is proportional to frequency and at 2.4 GHz, it is very high.

Through building materials, foliage etc, but not in free space/line-of-sight.

> Also, the distance over which one could communicate depends on antenna height, so if both parties are at ground level, it is not feasible over a few hundred meters unless both are in wide open space.

Isn't it just the opposite? Antenna height is only the limiting factor with line-of-sight, otherwise NLOS considerations like attenuation by building materials, multipath propagation etc. start to matter much more. Modern radio standards are extremely good at that.

Of course line-of-sight usually remains the ceiling, since there usually isn't much in the sky to helpfully reflect signals back down, at least with mobile transmitter compatible transmission levels (i.e. excluding shortwave).

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kanbankaren 10 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Through building materials, foliage etc, but not in free space/line-of-sight.

Yeah. Even in free space. For example, attenuation at 1 km for 144 MHz (ham VHF band) is about -76 dB while for 2.4 GHz, it is about -100 dB. That 24 dB drop could mean, the signal is below the noise floor of your receiver unless you increase the RF power output which means more battery drain.

For example, BT audio gets cut just moving to the next room despite the RF power of BT transmitters being ~ 5mW( 7 dBm ) and at 10m, the attenuation is -60 dB(just free space loss which is ideal condition), so 53 dBm (7-60) at the receiver is usually sufficient, yet they struggle.

	▲	lxgr 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		No, attenuation in vacuum is exactly the same, and the difference between humid air, dry air, and vacuum doesn't really matter at frequencies below a few GHz. > For example, attenuation at 1 km for 144 MHz (ham VHF band) is about -76 dB while for 2.4 GHz, it is about -100 dB. This is a common misunderstanding of the free-space path loss formula, which is expressed in terms of the idealized isotropic radiator, the length of which is frequency-dependent. In other words, this calculation is assuming a proportionally (much) smaller antenna for the 2.4 GHz case. With the same antenna size, the path loss is exactly the same. After all, where else should the radiated energy go?

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Workaccount2 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

This is great on paper until some jackass wants to access their home NAS over the public frequency range so they can watch anime all day at their desk, which only works when they use multiple channels at once.

There are tons of cool things society could enjoy if it wasn't for a small handful of shameless actors.

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jansper39 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Personally, the additional complexity and overheads required for a P2P phone network is not worth while and I'm not sure it would fix that many problems that haven't already been fixed with walkie talkies.

	▲	jonhohle 4 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It’s one less thing to have to buy and carry and charge and configure and remember and get others to do the same.
	▲	foltik an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Not worthwhile? “It’s too hard” isn’t a great argument for why our phones should just become useless during power outages, natural disasters, ..
	▲	lxgr an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not worthwhile to who? The point is exactly that everybody is carrying a phone, but almost nobody is carrying a walkie-talkie. And why should I carry one more thing? My smartphone has already replaced my music player, camera...

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lormayna an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A walkie-talkie requires a big antenna and consume a lot more power than a cellphone.

	▲	lxgr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Both not true. Both European PMR446 and the US FRS are limited to 0.5 W; GSM uses four times that. There are walkie-talkies with very small antennas too. The limiting factor is line-of-sight, in any case. If you're fine with less than real-time audio, you can get much, much smaller and low power.

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bilsbie 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Ham frequencies would work even better?