GROIC Day 2

Many many moons ago the older of my brothers and I saved a very large number of pennies and bought ourselves each a 5W 27MHz 40 channel hand-held walkie-talkie CB radio. These took 8 AA batteries to run (or 10 rechargeables), were the size of a small brick, and had an aerial that was about 1.5m long, which made them portable, but not exactly conveniently so.

My most memorable and enjoyable use of these was at the very first camp I ran when I became a Scout leader. We took our six or so Scouts across to Maria Island (a national park off the east coast of Tasmania), and invented the world’s most awesome wide game in the world’s most awesome wide game location. In addition to these two monster radios we had three or four really ancient single channel kiddie walkie talkies. The kiddie ones could talk to each other provided the users were close enough that shouting would have worked anyway, whereas the monsters were powerful enough to broadcast to and receive from the kiddie ones over a quite long distance (I don’t think we ever actually tested exactly how far). Anyhow, my brother and I — taking good care of the very expensive monsters — were “police helicopters” situated on top of a hill overlooking a wooded valley. Half of the Scouts had the kiddie walkie talkies and were the rest of the police force. The remaining Scouts were “criminals” who started at the top end of the valley, and who had to make their way to freedom at the bottom end of the valley without being captured by a member of the police force. From our vantage point atop the hill, my brother and I could spot the criminals who broke cover, and then relay instructions to the pursuing constabulary who could move to intercept. Anyway, it seemed to work really well.

A few years back my brother decided that I probably had more use for the second monster than he did, so he passed it into my care, but with the demise of the kiddie walkie talkies, there were limited options for what I could do with just these two machines. When I was in Melbourne my Scout group bought a set of four small UHF handhelds, which opened up all sorts of possibilities for games and fun. Not surprisingly, after I moved back to Hobart I bought my own set of four 477MHz UHF handhelds—each about the size of a large very thick credit card, which run on two AAA batteries, and that cost me less than 2/3 the cost of my original beast—and with their size and robustness and relative cheapness I am a little happier about letting Scouts run around in the bush with one. One of our favourite Scouting games involves night time hide and seek, where a team hides—and because of the nature of this game the restrictions on hiding places are very few—and then sends their GPS coordinates by radio to the other team who then has to find them. Finding is usually guaranteed, but there are all sorts of amusing possibilities that can arise (in fact, the variation that we usually play is that you send the coordinates of a glow stick which must be visible to the finders, and then your team must be hiding within 20m of the glowstick).

As far as I know, these monsters still work*, but the 27MHz HF channels are barely used these days, and they just aren’t practical for the kind of activities I do, so the time has come to find another home for them.

* Update: One of them is dead. I now have fewer regrets about giving them the flick (it will be quite difficult for contemporary folk to find a partner for the one that remains, as there are few radios that transmit these bands any more.)