See the one on the right? The Archer “Space Patrol”? Yeah, I had it. With the Morse Code key and everything! It was awesome! My buddies and me could run around in our army man gear and fight off Commies invading Southern California.
40 years before me and my buddies were fighting commies, our boys in the armed forces were facing a real threat. Nazis, the evil Emperor in Japan, and a Fascist in Italy were trying to take over the world. Carrier pigeons and smoke signals weren’t going to cut it in this new era of mechanized warfare. Troops were moving faster, and their communications needed to keep up. So, the boys at Motorola came up with the bright idea of giving guys a “hand held” radio that could receive and transmit voices through the ether.
Motorola SCR-300A: The first "walkie-talkie"
Enter the SCR-300A “walkie-talkie”. While there had been other radio sets up to this point, they were usually truck-mounted. The SCR-300A came in an ultraportable backpack that the radioman would wear while the CO would call in air support with the handset.
The story doesn’t end there, though. Since the mid-1930s, Alfred Gross had been working on a hand-held radio and sold his design to the Office of Strategic Services. It was a top secret program that connected men on the ground behind enemy lines with bombers and attack planes.
But wait! There’s more! A Canadian, Donald Hings, created a handie-talkie in 1940. This radio was the result of another top secret program, and put the power of communication in troops hands by 1942.
No matter who you believe to be the first — whether it’s nerds in a lab at Motorola, or a guy tinkering in his garage then running to the CIA’s forerunner with a design, or a Canadian making a handie-talkie while laying on his moose rug drinking a Molson — it’s pretty irrelevant. Men’s lives were saved in WW2 and the Commies didn’t dare invade my neighborhood in 1985.
[Image Credits: Public Domain]
But the radio man was pretty useless as a toy soldier. Sure, he would always be next to the officer with the pistol, but that's about all he could do.
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For civilian use walkie-talkies have pretty much been replaced by cell phones.
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They're still used for camping and other times people are too far from cell towers. I see a bunch of FRS/GMRS radios at the sporting goods stores, so presumably people still buy them.
If I drive 1/2 an hour into the forest where I live I no longer have cell service so hand held radios get alot of use up here .
Agreed, but a lot of people still use their cell phone as if they were two way radios: they move the device in front of their face to talk and then move it to their ear to listen. If you you are at the other end of that line, assuming a full duplex link, you will think that your connection is really bad as there will be a complete breakdown in communication. In addition to not hearing what you say half of the time, they end up talking too close and too loud into the microphone, which causes it to saturate which in turns causes the audio encoder chip to fail to do its job properly. The net result is that their speech comes through all chopped up. When you ask them to repeat (twice, because they could not hear you the first time!), they will then talk even louder, compounding the problem…
Yes, I know there are PTT (Push To Talk) service available but, as far as I know, not for the iPhone…
We use walkie-talkies all the time for geologic field work and class field trips. They're pretty much the only way to go for remote locations; some students are amazed to discover that there are still plenty of areas without cellular coverage. It's also handy to have simple PTT or voice-activated communications with several parties simultaneously (I know a similar mode is available from some cell services, but that still requires coverage, compatible phones, and an exchange of cell numbers). We find satphones to be quite useful at times, too, when out in the middle of nowhere.
This brought back some memories. From the late-'80's through just a few years ago my dad used a two-way radio system on the farm.
Most of the radios were Motorola HT600/P200 4-watt UHF units, some with the phone keypad and some without. Big heavy suckers, with the high-capacity batteries they weighed about 2 lbs. Most of them had a belt clip on the back and I carried mine on my right hip pocket. One survived falling off a 4-wheeler at 55 MPH, and my radio once got knocked off of me by a stray 70MPH wind gust with no apparent damage.
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But a few were other Motorola types… there were a couple VIZARs which weren't much fun (the carrying clip tended to break, and the batteries weren't very good), and my granddad got the GP300 with the phone pad. Also my dad's and my granddad's main-use pickups got dash-mounted units that had a bit more power than the handhelds. We had two channels, one was for radio-to-repeater for area-wide broadcast and two was for radio-to-radio only for coordinated work at a site farther from the repeater.
In the shop there was a 40 watt repeater with an 80-foot tower just out the back door. The repeater was linked into the business phone line, so whenever someone called the farm the repeater sent one ring out to the radios. Then the radios with the DTMF pad could control the hook switch with the star and hash keys. Usually my grandpa or dad would pick up using the radio if they were out in the field, and I never got tired of hearing the telemarketers get hung up on in mid-sentence by the hookswitch-command tones followed by the confirmation 4-tone signal from the repeater. The repeater enabled reliable conversation over most of our land except the farthest out fields, and in the right conditions you could receive the repeater's signal in town 18 miles away.
Now everyone has a cell phone, and while it's unusual to get more than 2 bars at the farm you can at least count on getting a text through. The batteries of the radios are mostly dead by now, those old primary-use pickups were parked in the trees years ago, and narrowbanding will shut down our old-tech system for good.
But did you play army men with them?
Awesome story! It's amazing some of the technology that is getting left behind.
I worked as a lifty (sp?) at Sunshine Village in Banff in the early 90s. Everyone working on the mountain wore a Motorola like the one in your picture in a chest harness. Some (the really cool ones) had an extension mike clipped to the collar of their jacket. There was a repeater on the top of the mountain and you could get static free communication anywhere within 5 or 6 miles of the peak. Somehow the "yeah I'm cool on the radio" feeling was the same as the one I got from the Coleco CB 40 I had when I was a kid and it never wore off.
My parents used them for geological field surveys. CN and CP used them across the country. We used them for deer hunting (although I think they were stolen from CN). Thinking about how many different industries used some variation of that same Motorola radio, I can't believe there aren't mountains of them in landfill. I guess maybe there are or maybe there are countless numbers of them still in use.
Here is a walkie-talkie from my younger days:
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How did you get the cat gut so clean as a kid?
Actually, it's sheep gut and there's a washing process like you use when making violin strings.
You're not as experienced as I thought. You were around after the discovery of Aluminum. I figured you would have been using tin cans
Hmph. Do you actually think that I have photographs from back then?
I had that 'space control' too as a kid, though I think it said Realistic on the top and lacked space control, at least I never could move satellites or anything like that with it. There used to be a great free museum in Chicago above the Randolf Street station entrance with all sorts of old Motorola gear. Man that company ruined itself when Zander came from Sun and decided it would be all about cellphones. They used to make great chips and boards, all sold off now. Anyway a trivia, the name is because they first made radios for cars.
I've used them when running a survey crew, snowboarding, caravanning across the country and to play army as child. I think we are still quite a few years from them being obsolete.