Rocky Talkie Mountain Radio Review: Expensive, but Worth It | WIRED

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8/10

If you have a family and you like to be outside, you should have walkie-talkies. In a lot of places where cell coverage is spotty, you need a better way of keeping track of each other than running back and forth and yelling. Kids love walkie-talkies. There’s nothing that my 9-year-old likes better than signaling back to base camp, “Come in, come in, make me cinnamon toast, over,” when she’s halfway through her hike.

I know this is not necessarily the intended use case for the Rocky Talkie, the super-popular and super-rugged backcountry radio that my friends use for backcountry skiing and ascending multi-pitch climbs. But kids are a lot harder on gear than many adults. We’ve been testing the Rocky Talkies on weekend trips all summer, dropping them while clipped to my backpack and running around in the rain.

We’ve tried walkie-talkies from several other brands, including cheap ones from Amazon and the standard Midland walkies, but the Rocky Talkies are my favorite, even if—and probably because—they are much more expensive than other options.

The Rocky Talkie comes in two different configurations. The Mountain Radio that we tested uses the FRS, or Family Radio Service band that the Federal Communications Commission reserves for most recreational walkie-talkie users. This is why you don’t usually pick up radio stations or big rig CB conversations on your walkie-talkie (although I have found that you still can if you try)

It also comes in a more powerful GMRS version that has IP67 submersible waterproofing and slightly longer battery life. Technically, you also need a license to operate the GMRS version, which I had no interest in procuring for my 9-year-old and 7-year-old. The Mountain Radio, on the other hand, is easy enough that my kids opened the box, turned them on, and started running around using them without me. Which, to be clear, is great!

Probably the most obvious difference between the Rocky Talkie and other radios is that a lot of two-way radios are just handhelds or use gator clips to clip onto your clothing or backpack straps, but the Rocky Talkie has an ultralight carabiner. I loved this. I have little pockets and wear little shorts. If I walk around with a walkie-talkie clipped onto my clothes, the walkie often slips off when I sit down and I lose them in the rocks. I love knowing that neither my loved ones nor I are going to lose or drop these.

Rocky Talkie Mountain Radio

Rating: 8/10

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Rocky Talkie also sent the optional waterproof handheld mic, which I used while escaping my family on long trail runs while camping. It was a nice option for putting in my running pack so I could talk to my daughter hands-free, but we didn’t end up using the mics very often because it was so much easier to just grab the walkies and go. (This will probably come into more use as we move into a snowy and rainy winter.)

Rocky Talkie states that the maximum range is 35 miles, but as with all walkie-talkies, this can be affected by everything from the terrain to the weather. I tested this range by handing one Rocky Talkie to my 9-year-old (who was more than happy to help by talking constantly) and going on the aforementioned trail runs, tracking my distance using a Garmin.

On clear, sunny days in the hills, she petered out at 2.5 miles; while trying to paddle across a forested lake, it was around a half-mile. Most of the time, though, while wandering around within a mile or so away from each other on the beach or in the trees by the river, I heard her just fine.

Other things I liked: The Mountain Radio has an estimated four days of battery life, and we found they usually still had a charge at the end of our three- to four-day camping trips. The charging is USB-C, which means I can recharge them from pretty much anywhere, including the random cables I found in our glove compartment and plugged into our Goal Zero power station.

Rocky Talkie Mountain Radio

Rating: 8/10

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They’re IP56 rated, which means they’re dust-protected and splashproof, if not fully submersible. We used them in downpours and on windy Oregon beaches, and they worked well. However, we're on the water often enough that I think I would prefer a walkie-talkie that I could actually drop into a lake.

The Rocky Talkies have all the things that walkie-talkies are supposed to have, like channel lock and privacy codes to cut down on the chatter on your channel, even though the places that we were camping over the summer were so remote that there was never anyone else on the channel anyway. Again, I imagine that this will change when we go skiing this winter.

The main problem with the Rocky Talkies is that they’re just so much more expensive than almost every other walkie-talkie out there. It’s hard to argue that you should spend this much more when all walkie-talkies use radio waves to communicate and are thus limited by line of sight. Whether you spend $30 or $200, you’re not going to have a better range than a half-mile in a wooded forest, so why would you ball out on these?

In the first place, these are much more reliable and clearer than our friends’ ultra-cheap $30 Amazon walkies. Compared to my friends’ Midlands, the transmissions are clearer. (It’s either that, or my daughter grew out of her lisp over the summer.)

Rocky Talkie Mountain Radio

Rating: 8/10

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The shape is much more compact and cuter, and the push-to-talk button is recessed, so I don't accidentally transmit my shit-talking behind everyone's back while I'm walking around, venting that my friend has been licking the peanut butter knife and putting it back in the jar, again. Anecdotally, the battery life seems to be much better, although to be fair, I was comparing them to a much older Midlands model, and battery life is much less of an issue if you’re staying in a cabin and can just pop them back into the charging dock every few hours.

Another point to consider: I have a few friends who own Rocky Talkies, mostly because you can clip them to a climbing harness. But most of my friends own Midlands models. While technically walkie-talkies from different brands are compatible as long as you’re on the same channel, in practice I have not found them to connect reliably 100 percent of the time. Sometimes it takes a lot of channel cycling (going up and down between the channels) to find a channel that reliably connects across brands.

Rocky Talkie Mountain Radio

Rating: 8/10

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This is nerve-wracking, especially when you're in areas where you just don't have other ways of communicating. When you’re sitting on a remote lakeshore at dusk, wondering if you really will see this other family again or if they’ve all fallen out of a canoe and drowned in the dark, I would much rather that everyone use the same brand and model of walkie-talkie. In most cases, that usually means a Midlands walkie-talkie. The Rocky Talkies are also a few ounces heavier than several of the Midlands models that I’ve used.

These are mere quibbles compared to how easy it has been to use these walkie-talkies—to the point where we now use them almost every day, just to walk around our neighborhood. If you’re just hoofing it around your remote weekend property, then I would say to stick to the much more affordable Midlands. But if you’re going on camping trips where you won’t be seeing much of anyone for three to four days at a time, I would say it’s worth paying a little extra for walkie-talkies that won't run out of battery power and that you know won’t fail on you—as long as everyone in your group can afford them.

I plan on clipping mine to my daughter at two points just to make sure she can’t lose it while walking to Grandma's house a couple blocks away. It’s wild out there, and you just never know.

Rocky Talkie Mountain Radio

Rating: 8/10

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